Jesus Brand Spirituality

Teachers’ Notes

I’d like to begin by telling the story of how I came to faith, because the Bible tells the story of God offering to get our stories tangled up with his.

I had a light dusting of Christian faith as a child. It was an era (the 1950’s) when such things weren’t discussed, at least not in my part of the world. I attended an Episcopal Church. For all the lovely people I met there, I can’t remember a single sermon. But I do remember Sunday School and in particular a Sunday school teacher of mine whom I observed with tears in her eyes as she came back from receiving communion—an early indication that Christianity moved people.

Like many of my generation, I rejected the faith of my childhood, even fancied myself a rebel atheist—nobly abstaining from religion, the opiate of the people. That lasted until I got my girlfriend pregnant and found myself at the University of Michigan, newly married, a brand new dad, on my own financially, and WAY over my noble head.

My introduction to faith came first, not through reading the Bible, but through a member of an informal community that was part of the then burgeoning “Jesus movement,” Brian Martin, reaching out to me. He visited Nancy and me in the hospital where Nancy, in the fifth month of pregnancy was in the process of losing our baby, after days of bleeding and threatened miscarriage. The doctor had informed us it was past hope. But the night our Jesus friend visited, that very night, the crisis passed–he had prayed and gotten his friends to pray for us that night. We named our son, Jesse, not realizing the name means, “God exists.”

This love from Brian, this experience of our child spared, led me to read the gospel of Matthew. Which introduced me in a different way to Jesus. It was unlike any reading experience I’d ever had. The founder of Christianity came off the page to haunt me, a spiritual presence beyond the paper. Eventually, I offered myself, as did Nancy, as a follower.

I say this, because the Bible does not stand alone, at least not in my story. It comes as part of a mosaic or a network that includes the work of the Spirit, the community of Jesus, reason and experience.

The Bible is our book. But what is the Bible, fundamentally?

Some would say the Bible is no more than a dusty ancient text (like any other), a museum piece whose time is past. Something to gather dust where the family heirlooms are kept, alongside grandpa’s purple heart from the war.

Others would say the Bible is fundamentally an instruction manual that helps you put your life together like a piece of pressed board furniture: how to be and what to do in every situation.

But both of theses answers (you may have identified one as “liberal” and the other as “conservative”) are wrong.

Fundamentally, the Bible is the Love Story of God in Search of Humanity.

This fits who we are as human beings. Stories move us more powerfully than mere instructions do. (Of course, the Bible includes instructions; my point is that the Bible is not fundamentally that.) Stories have a way of insinuating their ways into our own hearts, shaping the way we look at the world and move through it. We cannot help but see our own lives as a kind of story, with themes and plot, and by extension, with meaning.

When two people find each other and fall in love, their stories intersect, and they become involved in each other’s story, and their lives form one new story. The Bible is God’s story worked out through human history with room for us.

In a nutshell here’s the love story the Bible is telling:

ACT I: Genesis, chapter 2. A garden (Eden) where all is well; a place where God and humans live in harmony at every conceivable level. The garden tells us that there’s a place for us, and that this place is with God, with each other, and with ourselves within ourselves–all in a state of peace. (We see this longing for a place every time children gather dining room chairs and throw a blanket over them to make a tent, or insist on making a little dwelling place out of the cardboard box that the new stove came in.)

In the middle of this garden you may recall a river: the headwaters of all that brings life to the world. And you may also recall a breach of trust that seems to have come out of nowhere. Everything the garden was freely given; in fact God’s first words to the humans were “You are free…” Except for the one thing that was God’s alone: the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. And, of course, we had to have it, so we took it—and the perfect trust was breached. And ever since, we seem to be replaying the same theme–grasping for knowledge that we’re not quite ready for, enhancing our capacity for evil along with our power for good.

As an oblique foreshadowing, the garden includes the inferred loss of an innocent life as God provides the humans with an animal pelt to cover what they perceived for the first time with shame. The story ends with exile from the Garden: God from us, and us from God.

ACT 2: Ezekiel, chapter 47. The people of Israel have formed since the Garden and the exile and they are now on the verge of another exile. The armies of Babylon are at the gates of the holy city, Jerusalem. But far away in Babylon is a Hebrew priest and prophet who has a vision. He’s called in the vision, mysteriously, “Son of Man” perhaps because there’s something about his people, Israel, that represents all of humankind.

He has a vision of a temple, like the one in Jerusalem on steroids. The temple, it seems, is a continuation of the Garden. It’s a reminder that there is still a place for us where all that’s gone wrong between us and God and each other and within ourselves can be resolved—or the hope of the same, at least, can be known.

Ezekiel’s visionary temple has huge gates. Unnaturally large gates. As though God wants us to know that there is a way back in to that place represented by the Garden of Eden. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say going forward to that place, as time seems to be God’s way of saying there’s no going back, only forward.

And in the temple that Ezekiel was shown by vision, there is a river. A river runs through this garden-temple too. And this river seems also to be the source of all living things. And of course, like any temple, there is an altar. In fact the river flows from the altar’s base.

ACT 3: John, chapter 7. This time, it’s Herod’s temple in Jerusalem, centuries later, and it’s the last great day of the feast of tabernacles (tabernacle being another form of temple.) We’re told that the temple priests went through a ritual during this feast that brought out of the temple to one of the pools of water fed by a spring, where they dipped silver pitchers and brought water back in festal procession—back into the temple itself, to pour the water out at the base of the temple’s altar. As if to say, “We’re thirsty here! We’re longing for the day when what this place represents becomes a reality in our midst and the river of life is flowing freely again!”

Perhaps at this very moment (it would have been fitting) Jesus stands up and cries out in a loud voice: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink, and out of his heart will flow rivers of living water!” As if to say, “I myself am the fulfillment of all that the Garden, and the tabernacle, and the temple have ever stood for. I am the place where you can meet God and be at peace with him, and with others, and even, within yourselves.”

This is the Bible: The Love Story of God in Search of Humanity! Culminating, not in a text, but in a person: truth coming to us in it’s most advanced form. “I am the truth” Jesus said, not “I tell you the truth” (though of course, he does.)

This is where it gets interesting. Many Christians have a distorted understanding of the Bible. They view the Bible in much the same way that a faithful Muslim views the Koran.

The Qur’ān…is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe that the Qur’ān is the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind, and consider the text (in the original Arabic) to be the final, divine revelation of God. Islam holds that the Qur’ān was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gibraele (Gabriel) over a period of 23 years. The importance of the Quran for Muslims and Islam is tantamount to the importance of Jesus Christ for Christians and Christianity. (Wikepedia, Koran)

The Bible holds a fundamentally different place in Christianity than does the Koran in Islam. Because the Bible is not viewed as the final word by Christian. Jesus is viewed as the final word. “In these last days [God] has spoken to us through his Son” (Hebrew 1: 1-2). “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1)

The Bible is a signpost leading us to the truth in person, God’s last and final word to humanity: Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, dead and buried; risen from the dead, coming again to judge the living and the dead.

When we miss this, we miss what’s unique about Christianity. The Bible becomes an end, not a means to an end. There is a tendency to simply use the Bible as a club to bludgeon others, rather than to experience the Bible as a heart piercing arrow for one’s self. There is a tendency for the Bible to become just another text used to bolster just another argument.

The first recorded words—the first time in the Bible that words from God were committed to a text—was when Moses went up Mt. Sinai to meet with God. God spoke words that Moses heard with his ears, that reverberated in his heart, and then the words were etched in tablets of stone and delivered to the people at the base of the mountain.

The people had words like we have words on a page, separated from a voice. A shadow, not the reality itself. So the people followed Moses around because he was the only one who had heard the words with the voice. Because as any communications theorist will tell you the words alone, without the voice, are about ten-percent of the message.

And so it went for Israel. After Moses other prophets were raised, one or two per generation. Some generations went without a living prophet.

Until Jesus came: the word made flesh, dwelling among us. People who heard him teach said, “Wow! What authority! Not like our teachers!” Because, though they didn’t realize it, they were hearing the words like Moses heard the words: they heard living words connected with a voice.

Jesus didn’t leave behind a written text. By that I mean he didn’t say while he was teaching, “Is the microphone on? I want to get this recorded and written down.” A text came in his wake, an inspired text, as his followers wrote down what they remembered of his words. But Jesus didn’t do any of the writing. He didn’t leave behind a text in that sense. He left behind a personal presence, his presence, God’s presence, in the form of the Holy Spirit.

On the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit was poured out on all flesh, God was saying, “Let all of my people be as Moses, be as the prophets who not only have my words, but who hear my voice!”

Our trinity is not: Father, Son, Holy Bible. Our trinity is Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Here at the beginning of the 21st Century, the Spirit is confronting the church with a message that is meant as a challenge to both sides in the 20th Century battle over the Bible. At least, this what I discern the Spirit to be doing.

There’s an old battle we’ve been fighting in the church: the battle between the so called “liberal” view of the Bible and the so called “conservative” view. It seems to me the church in our generation is like Joshua, a new leader for a new time, meeting the angel of the Lord, the commander of the hosts from heaven saying, “Whose side are you on? Us or our enemies?” And the Lord said to Joshua: “Neither! Take off your shoes, this is holy ground!”

Imagine that the Bible, this God-breathed book, this word, is in our hands as this golden box is in my hand.

There are those who stand outside the text, seeking to dismiss it, deconstruct it, debunk it, making the point that it’s more or less like any text. Call this the “liberal” posture toward the Bible.

Over and against this, are those who stand outside the text, seeking to defend it against those who wish to dismiss it, deconstruct it, debunk it. Those actively engaged in “the battle for the Bible.” Call this the “conservative” posture.

If anything, I would identify with this latter group. Because in the face of the attempt to dismiss the Bible as just another book, my hackles are raised. This book led me to Jesus. I’ve spent more or less daily time with this book for past 30 years. I’ve read through it multiple times. I find it so powerful, and my own soul so needy, that I’m now at the point where four times a day (more or less every day) I pause and say my prayers with these words. I spend time every morning before work or rest, in quiet, often with the words of this book feeding me.

But I see this second posture toward the Bible—standing outside of it, like a guard to protect it against assault—as a temptation, not an invitation from God.

Because both approaches—the so called liberal approach and the so called conservative approach to the Bible–are built on the same foundation. The foundation is the foundation of the modern era which is being critiqued by those who call themselves for lack of a better word, “post-modern”.
It’s not an accident that the same blind spots in the modern view of the world (shaped by modern science, materialism, and rationalism) are blind spots in much of what is called “conservative theology.” These are too many to go into in depth, so I will just list them briefly: an “anti-supernatural bias” that all but expelled the Holy Spirit from the Trinity; an “anti-experience bias” that held spiritual experience, the very stuff of faith, in a position of an almost hostile scrutiny; an “anti-communal bias” that viewed faith through the lens of modern individualism; an “anti-humility bias” that overestimated our capacity for certain-objective knowledge, ignoring St. Paul’s reminder that “we see through a glass darkly.”

For this reason, I suggest that’s it time for Christians who seek to be faithful to reject the “liberal-conservative” category as useful in matters of discerning biblical truth. It’s too easy to assume that “conservative-liberal” is a short-hand for faithful-unfaithful. It’s isn’t. This leads us to reject biblical truth that is out of step with a “conservative” theology, simply because we assume anything that isn’t “conservative” must be “liberal” and therefore “unfaithful.”

It can work the opposite way of course, but I speak as someone who when forced to choose between a so called “liberal” approach to the Bible and a so called “conservative” approach has opted for the latter. But that’s my present point: we shouldn’t view the choice in those terms any more.

The biblical category is faithful-unfaithful, not “conservative-liberal.” These words (the “L” and “C” words, that is) aren’t even found in the Bible—except the King James Version which translates “generous” as “liberal” often. The conservative-liberal category may be useful in describing political positions, but it’s only confusing and misleading and I would add, unbiblical, as a category to describe matters of faith. I for one am tired of it. Let’s give it a proper funeral and move and get on with our lives.

Both the “defend from without and dismiss from without” approaches to the Bible are but a shadow—the words minus the voice, like the people of Israel at the base of the mountain—while the Spirit is available to all people inviting us into the reality of the words with the voice.

The Last Word, that is: Jesus. We are invited to enter him, like a worshipper comes into the temple. “The word made flesh, tabernacled among us.”

We surrender to Jesus, and in so doing, he takes us in. To himself. Into the fire of divine love. And there, in the fire of divine love, we hear words connected to a voice. Because when we come into Jesus we come into him who is the Word.

There is no Christian reading of the Bible apart from Christ. We read the bible as it were in a cave, staring at fire, with the sympathetic high priest next to us….

To repeat an earlier point: over the last 500 years or so, the modern era has done it’s best to suck the life out of these words. Got us thinking of these words like a text we fight over. Outside of us. Something we can master. Some of us tried to master it by dismissing it. Others tried to master it by defending it.

The Pharisees were people of the book. They were the “conservatives” of their day regarding the book. But Jesus challenged them: “You diligently study the Scriptures thinking that by them you have life. But you refuse to come to me…..”

As words, separated from a voice, we might try to master this book. But when we come into Jesus, something wonderful happens: in him, the words and the voice are reunited. Which is what it means to say that this is “a living word.”

I go back to my early encounter as a frightened freshman at the University of Michigan, married, a new father, and one insecure atheist, in need of something decidedly other than myself.

I did not say to myself: “Self! Which of the great sacred books is the finest of all? Ah, the Bible! The Bible is the word of God. Therefore I will read the Bible and do what it tells me.”

No I was drawn into something more like a network of influences connected in a web or a net of love. Interdependently related influences. Or to shift the metaphor, I was allowed to catch a glimpse of Jesus in a mosaic.

The mosaic includes these five things:
Scripture/Spirit/Community/Reason/Experience.

The Bible is a living word interpreted under the guidance of the Spirit in the context of community (past and present) with the aid of reason and experience.

Scripture: a living word, which means not something that stands alone because things that stand alone are cut off from life.

Spirit: Something more powerful than words on a page was at work–something more alive, something more present. The Spirit beckons us to come into Jesus.

Community: “We are baptized by the Spirit into one body” said Paul–into the community, into Jesus; into Jesus by way of the community. [Usually it is a member of the Jesus community who first invites us to pay attention to Jesus.] We’re meant to read/hear the words of God from the book of God, in the context of the Jesus community. Which is fitting because God himself, as revealed by Jesus is a community: Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Reason: There were different version of the Shema, Israel’s creed floating around during the time of Christ. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and might.” Jesus always used the version that added “mind.” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength” Because Jesus was the Word [Logos: Wisdom-Reason Incarnate]”

We are meant to wrestle with God, with his words, with our reason. Some say to get “into the word” you need to leave your mind behind. And it’s true that brain power alone cannot inherit the kingdom, but we’re supposed to bring our mind with us into the heart of God.

Something doesn’t make sense, so we press in, question, raise objections….If your are not having any arguments with God, you’re keeping your distance.

Experience: My generation used think that those who emphasized experience in matters of faith had to be balanced by those who emphasized the Bible. As if the two represented opposite ends of a spectrum. But the Bible is a book that records the experience of people with God throughout history. The Bible is a book that is meant to mediate experience. Take the experience out of the Bible and all you have left are the chapter and verse numbers that we added by an editor to help us find our place.

As long as we’re talking about experience, we might as well wade into some deeper philosophical waters. There are those who say, “”I don’t interpret the Bible! I don’t read the Bible through any lenses. I read it, believe it and do what it says!” They claim to be able to “objectively” read the Bible.

(But of course, that’s not so easy to demonstrate. We all bring our own experience into the reading of anything, including the Bible, perhaps even especially the Bible. We read through the lenses of our own experience. The act of reading, or hearing, or having anything register with us is none other than a subjective experience. It happens inside our heads, after all, within our bodies. The only thing more “dangerous” than reading the Bible “subjectively” is denying that we do it!

This is perhaps part of the reason that God chooses to reveal himself through a mosaic including Scripture, the Spirit, the Community (past and present), Reason, and Experience. Together, it’s better.

Once we accept what seems to me to be a God-given context for the Bible, the context that we find within the pages of the Bible itself, the more powerful the Bible can be in our experience; that is to say, the more it’s God-breathed-ness, enters our being and our breath mingles with the breath of God and we are powerfully changed in the process.

Participant Notes

Some would say, a dusty ancient text like any other, a museum piece. Something to gather dust alongside other family heirlooms.

Others would say, the Bible is an instruction manual that helps you put your life together like a piece of pressed board furniture….how to be and what to do in every situation.

But BOTH of those answers [the so called “liberal” answer and the so called “conservative” answer] are wrong.

The Bible is the Love Story of God in Search of Humanity.

When two people fall in love, their stories intersect, and they become involved in each other’s story, and their lives form one new story…the Bible shows how this happens between God and us….

[A Brief Re-Telling of the Biblical Love Story: Eden’s Garden; Ezekiel’s Temple; Jesus in Herod’s Temple]

The Love Story of God in Search of Humanity culminates, not in a text, but in a person.

Many Christians have a distorted understanding of the Bible. They view the Bible in much the same way that a faithful Muslim views the Koran.

The Qur’ān is the central religious text of Islam. Muslims believe that the Qur’ān is the book of divine guidance and direction for mankind, and consider the text (in the original Arabic) to be the final, divine revelation of God. Islam holds that the Qur’ān was revealed to Muhammad by the angel Gibraele (Gabriel) over a period of 23 years. The importance of the Quran for Muslims and Islam is tantamount to the importance of Jesus Christ for Christians and Christianity. (Wikepedia, Koran)

The Bible holds a fundamentally different place in Christianity than does the Koran in Islam. Because the Bible is not viewed as the final word. Jesus is viewed as the final word. “In these last days [God] has spoken to us through his Son” (Heb.1: 1-2). “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God” (John 1:1)

The Bible is a signpost leading us to the truth in person, God’s last and word to humanity: Jesus of Nazareth, crucified, dead and buried; risen from the dead, coming again to judge the living and the dead.

The first recorded words–the first time in the Bible that words from God were committed to a text–was when Moses went up Mt. Sinai to meet with God (Exodus 20). God spoke words that Moses heard with his ears, that reverberated in his heart, and then the words were etched in tablets of stone and delivered to the people at the base of the mountain.

The people had words like words on a page separated from voice. A shadow, not the full reality. So the people followed Moses around because he was the only one who had heard the words with the voice. Because as any communications theorist will tell you the words alone, without the voice, are about ten-percent of the message.

So it went for Israel. After Moses other prophets were raised, one or two per generation. Some generations went without a living prophet.
Until Jesus came: the word made flesh, dwelling among us. People who heard him teach said, “Wow! What authority!” Because, though they didn’t realize it, they were hearing the words like Moses heard the words: they heard living words connected with a voice.
On the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit was poured out on all flesh, God was saying, “Let all of my people be as Moses, be as the prophets who not only have my words, but who hear my voice!”
Our trinity is not: Father, Son, Holy Bible, but Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
Here at the beginning of 21st Century, Spirit is challenging both sides in the 20th Century battle over the Bible.
There’s an old battle we’ve been fighting in the church: between the so called “liberal” view of the Bible and the so called “conservative” view. The church in our generation is like Joshua, a new leader for a new time, meeting the angel of the Lord, the commander of the hosts of heaven saying, “Whose side are you on? Us or our enemies?” And the Lord said to Joshua: “Neither! Take off your shoes, holy ground!” (see Joshua 5: 13-16)

But look a little deeper: both approaches (so called “liberal” and so called “conservative”) were products of a time and mindset when the church was suspicious of spiritual experience; Holy Spirit all but expelled from the Trinity. A product of modern rationalism.

Both assumed Bible is fundamentally a text–words minus a voice–to be mastered: one side by dismissing it, another by defending it.

The Pharisees were people of the book. The “conservatives” of their day regarding the book. But Jesus challenged them: “You diligently study the Scriptures thinking that by them you have life. But you refuse to come to me…..” (John 5: 39-40)

Jesus ushered in a new era, a new relationship to the Word itself. He is himself, the word, last word, the reality to which the text points.

We are invited to enter him, like a worshipper comes into the temple. “The word made flesh, tabernacled among us.” (John 1:14)

The Bible is a living word spoken and heard by inspiration of the Spirit in the context of community (past & present) with the aid of reason and experience.

The Mosaic:
Scripture
Spirit
Community
Reason
Experience