Chapter 4: The Palingenesis of Christianity

Times of corruption await all human things, even though of divine origin. New ambassadors from God will be required with exalted power to draw the recreant to itself and purify the corrupt with heavenly fire, and every such epoch of humanity is a palingenesis of Christianity, and awakes its spirit in a new and more beautiful form (Schleiermacher, pg. 251).

When Jesus appeared on the scene, he brought with him a conception of God that was radically new and different from the conception held by the teachers of the Jewish faith into which he was born. His ideas were so different, in fact, that his teachings and later expositions of his teachings came to be labeled as the “New Testament” of God. Jesus represented an evolution in the consciousness of man; a movement from the God “out there” to the God “in here.”

Judaism, the religion into which Jesus was born, was a religion of appeasement; God was out there, in the heavens, and intervened in the affairs of man to punish or reward his behavior. When man transgressed against the commandments of God, he was required to offer a blood sacrifice to atone for his transgressions. In many ways, the religion of Judaism resembled other primitive religions that used blood sacrifices to appease the gods. And yet, the religion of Abraham was qualitatively different and represented a radical departure from the old religions.

Before Abraham, The gods were not only “out there,” but were impersonal. These gods controlled the forces of nature. Humanity entreated the gods and offered ritual sacrifices in order to “manage” the natural world and secure favors – fertility, bountiful crops, etc. . . Not only were these gods not especially concerned about man and his behavior, but they often acted badly themselves. They saw these Gods in all of nature, and created fantastic images and stories about them. The natural world and the fantasy world were indistinguishable. In the spiritual development of humanity, we might call this stage one faith.

When Abraham came along , an amazing thing happened. God spoke to him. Before, man had called on the Gods; now, we are told, God called on man. In the story of Abraham, God chose, not just an individual, but a whole lineage of people to be children. While animal sacrifice was retained as the primary method of appeasing God, these sacrifices became the vehicle not just to secure favors from an impersonal God, but to atone for the corporate disobedience of the chosen people . This was a revolutionary step both in the conception of God and in the consciousness, or spiritual evolution of man. It is during this time that a tribe was brought together, and held together, with the “stories” of faith; the heroes, the villains, the battles and the victories. In the evolutionary scheme, this is the move towards stage two faith.

Most scholars agree that sometime after 1000 B.C.E., man and his perception of “God” began to change. The mysterious philosopher known as Zoroaster would be the first to break on the scene, appearing in the area now known as the Middle East. Many believe that Zoroaster would be the first to conceive of a monotheistic God who was concerned with the the individual and personal development of mankind, and more specifically, his moral behavior. The religion of Zoroaster was one in which God rewarded or punished each individual person for his moral behavior. This would also be a theme in the teachings of a number of other key religious figures who came shortly after Zoroaster. During this time, the ancient religion of the Vedic tradition would develop into the Hindu religion with the appearance of the Upanishads. Siddhartha Gautama, the man who would come to be known as the Buddha, was Born also in this time frame, although the exact dates of his life and death are often disputed.

Shortly after the development of these world religions, Jesus would appear on the scene; a man who was, perhaps, the greatest spiritual revolutionary in history; and for the Western world, the harbinger of a more personal god and a more egoistic expression of faith; the hallmark of stage three in the evolution of faith.

The key development in all three traditions during this time was the idea that the moral behavior of the individual – not the tribe – was of key importance. In the Buddhists and Hindu traditions, the ideas of karma and samsara were being linked more closely to moral behavior; and the standards for moral behavior were being articulated. In the same vein, Jesus was not only stressing the importance of, but was raising the bar for individual morality. “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law,” he told his listeners, “you will certainly not enter the kingdom of God. (Matthew 5:20, NIV).

But a new standard for morality was not the only innovation Jesus would introduce. Jesus was, for the first time, proposing the radical idea that God was not just “out there,” but that he was “in here”; that his kingdom existed within the individual:

"Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, 'The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘here it is,’ or ‘there it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you "(Luke 17:20-21).

The new standard of morality proposed by Jesus would be possible, he asserts, because they would now have the spiritual essence of God living within them:

"If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the father, and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you" (John 14: 15-17).

With the coming of this counselor, or “Spirit of truth,” we find for the first time the voice of God coming from within rather than from the God who was “out there.” “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you (John 14:26).”

This is a radical innovation, and one that directly threatened the power of the priests, the religious brokers of the time. In the Jewish practice of faith, people made contact with the divine at the altar of sacrifice in the temple. By suggesting that the locus of contact with the almighty was inside the individual, Jesus was rendering the physical altar obsolete in the lives of the believers. This idea is made clear when it is reported in both the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Luke that on the day Jesus was crucified, the curtain that covered the entrance to the Holy of Holies where the sacrifices were offered in the temple was torn from top to bottom. The symbolism here is clear: the work of Jesus had ushered out the age of animal sacrifices being offered by select intermediaries between God and man.

Obviously, this innovation would be anything but welcomed and embraced by the priestly class who stood to lose their jobs. In the history of spiritual evolution, one often finds that it is the royalty of the old consciousness who stands to lose the most in the process of evolving; and it is over and over again that issues of politics and power generate strong and often violent resistance to the bringers of new fire from the Gods. Jesus would be crucified for his efforts; but man’s conception of God would never be the same. It would be up to Paul, the great storyteller, to mythologize the work of Christ in terms that could be understood and preserved by the broader culture.

Paul, or Saul of Tarsus as he was known before his conversion on the road to Damascus, would become the central figure in the building and shaping of the new religious tradition that would emerge after the death of Jesus. Jesus had left no written texts that we know of, but his teachings were being written down by various people who had been in contact with him. There were small groups of believers who scattered after the day of Pentecost, but these isolated groups appear to have developed very different practices and interpretations of Jesus teaching. Some theologians speculate that Christianity could have eventually disappeared, dissolving into the amalgamation of religious practices within the Roman empire, had not Paul taken up the mantle of church builder.

Paul’s role in the formation and maintenance of the infant church was that of being a translator. Paul took the meaning of Jesus’ life and teachings as he saw them and attempted to put them in terms that the ordinary man or woman could understand. It was within the writings of Paul that the imagery of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb of God was born.

Jesus did not use the imagery of himself as the sacrificial lamb to characterize his work or ministry. John the Baptist was the first to refer to him as the “lamb of God” (John 1). Aside from that incident and a reference by Jesus at the last supper to his blood being the “blood of the covenant” (Matt. 26:27-29), a passage that some scholars believe may have been editorialized by the writer of Matthew’s gospel, Jesus does not connect his death to the old system of sacrifice. While he submitted himself to death at the hands of his persecutors, and while he accepted the fact that his death may be necessary, the sense is one of martyrdom rather than a ritualistic blood sacrifice to appease God.

Paul develops the imagery of Jesus as the ultimate blood sacrifice in the book of Hebrews. Perhaps the most straightforward analogy of this is in the 9th chapter. After a recounting of the old covenant system and the tabernacle around which it revolved, Paul explains that
When Christ came as high priest of the good things that are already here, he went through the greater and more perfect tabernacle that is not man-made, that is to say, not a part of this creation. He did not enter by means of blood of goats and calves, but he entered the most holy place once and for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that leads to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance – now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant (Hebrew 9:11-15).

Learning theory tells us that we learn new concepts only as we are able to relate them to things we already know. Analogy is the greatest teacher; and what Paul is doing here is creating an analogy; not providing a literal account of the work of Christ. If I tell you that a mango is like a cross between a banana and a peach, I’m not implying that a mango is a literal combination of a banana and a peach. A mango is, in fact, a completely different fruit; but until you taste it, you can only understand it as it relates to what you already know. The Jewish people of the time were quite familiar with the language of blood sacrifice, and the terminology was embedded with rich meaning. Jesus had introduced a radically new way of relating to the divine; but until one had experienced it, one could only begin to understand by relating it to something they already understood. In many ways, Paul was a master teacher.

Here, in 2007 America – and in most of the world, for that matter – blood sacrifice as a way of appeasing the Gods is something that we understand only as a primitive practice by superstitious and intellectually underdeveloped people. Yet, it is the predominant mythology used by fundamentalists in their conception of God, Jesus, and the relationship between them. I remember gruesome imagery that we sang about in our services, “Are you washed in the blood?” “Nothing but the blood,” and “Oh, the blood of Jesus,” to name a few. Fundamental Pentecostals often seem obsessed with the blood; and the fact that God is thirsty for it.

Fundamenatalism and the Blood Mythology
What can wash away my sin?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus
What can make me whole again?
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Nothing can for sin atone,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus
Naught of good that I have done
Nothing but the blood of Jesus
(Robert Lowry, 1876).

My religious upbringing taught me that God was not a very nice person. He didn't like people very much, and was chronically angry at them. In fact, the whole myth of salvation is built around the idea that God demanded the death of all of us worthless, rotten sinners, but proved his "love" by killing his perfect son instead.

Now, I'm not a psychologist; but I suspect that an early introduction to this concept of God might foster a few subconscious "trust issues" in the minds of children concerning their heavenly father. In fact, if we take the Old Testament as literal truth, God seems to have a penchant for killing. As the Biblical writers tell it, he commanded his people to slaughter whole cities, men women and children. After he led his chosen people out of Egypt and into the wilderness, he regularly knocked off a few in fits of rage. He famously capped off the plague sequence in Egypt by killing all the first born sons of Egypt – innocent children – while they slept in their beds.

During the Easter season when my son was 8 years old, we watched "The Ten Commandments" on television together. I suppose that years of blood myth exposure had desensitized me to the violence; but my son was shocked by what he saw. During a commercial break, he came to me and said, with a look of confusion and fear, "if God would kill all those kids back then, how do I know he won't kill me now?" My heart broke; it broke for my young sons fear, but also for the dirty, slanderous image of God that had been cast in the wet cement of his young mind.

I suppose I had the same suspicions about God as a child, even if they were subconscious. Maybe that explains why I lay awake at night even after I had walked the aisle. Perhaps it is the same reason that children with parents given to violent fits of rage are tense and on their guard even when dad is in a good mood. God was an enigma to whom we gave lip service, but we didn't want to deal with him in any direct way. Jesus was like the big brother that stood between us and an abusive father; a suffering sibling who took the abuse directed as us. We stood behind him every time we went into God’s presence, beginning and or ending every prayer with "in Jesus name." In the blood sacrifice myth, the God of the Old Testament is the unpredictable, distant and explosively violent father who loves us perfectly. We are to fear him (and with good reason) while loving him with all our heart, soul and mind.

Children have a hard time understanding such paradoxes, and they have a hard time trusting parents who abuse them. They don't understand why; they just internalize this as an awful failure on their part; more evidence of the evilness that they are constantly told defines them.

The blood sacrifice myth is an analogy that had been carried forward well past its time. As a result, fundamentalism pulls people backwards into a way of understanding the world that has long passed. We have taken an analogy of the truth that made sense two thousand years ago and made it the literal truth that makes absolutely no sense to people today. The message of Jesus is still relevant today; but by casting it in primitive imagery, we have made it unintelligible. And I am not the first person to make this claim.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his call for “religionless Christianity”

While going through my reorganization of faith, I finally seemed to find a “faith home” in the writings of what have often been called the “existential” German Theologians. One of the theologians often included in this group was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man called to live out his Christian faith in the harsh realities of the his times in a way that few of us have been called to do.

Dietrich was born in Breslau, Germany in 1906 to a reasonably affluent, middle-class family of professionals. He was raised in the Lutheran Church, and very early on decided that he wanted to become a minister. After attending College in Tubingen and achieving a Doctorate in Theology at the University of Berlin, he spent a year in post-graduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. His may have been a good, quiet life after his return to Germany, since that was his temperament, had it not been for the events that were transpiring in his native country. Bonhoeffer found himself “thrown into time” to use Heidegger’s terminology, during the boiling cauldron of pre-ww II Germany.

The truth is, the “good” life produces few great men. Great men – and great ideas—are more often than not borne in the crucible of human turmoil and social crisis. Upon returning home, Bonhoeffer found a Germany in which the Church had blurred the lines between nationalism and religion, and was rallying behind Hitler. Determined to stand up for the truth in a world gone mad, Bonhoeffer joined forces with the resistance movement, and would spend the next few years until his imprisonment working tirelessly in the service of the Confessing Church (a resistance church he established with Karl Barth and others ) and involved in a number of coordinated attempts by the movement to assassinate the Fuhrer. All these attempts would ultimately fail, and Bonhoeffer would spend the last two of his short 39 years imprisoned by the Nazis. It was here that some of his greatest ideas for which he is remembered would develop. Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging on April 9, 1945.

While Bonhoeffer published a number of works on the Christian life, one of his most noted works is his “Ethics.” Although he never finished the book, he continued to work on the book throughout his imprisonment. One concept that he develops in the “Ethics” is the concept of the division between the world and the church that has come to characterize Christianity as he sees it.

The division of the total reality into a sacred and a profane sphere, a Christian and a secular sphere, creates the possibility of existence in a single one of these spheres, a spiritual existence which has no part in secular existence, and a secular existence which can claim autonomy for itself and can exercise this right of autonomy in its dealings with the spiritual sphere. . . So long as Christ and the world are conceived as two opposing and mutually repellent spheres, man will be left in the following dilemma: he abandons reality as a whole, and places himself in one or other of the two spheres. He seeks Christ without the world, or he seeks the world without Christ. In either case he is deceiving himself. . . One is denying the revelation of God in Jesus Christ if one tries to be “Christian” without seeing and recognizing the world in Christ. There are, therefore, not two spheres, but only the one sphere of the realization of Christ, in which the reality of God and the reality of the world are united (Ethics, 194-195).

Bonhoeffer felt that this division of the sphere of the “world” and the sphere of ”church” was a false division, and that the development of it had rendered Christianity as ineffective and perhaps even superfluous in the world.

Growing up fundamentalist, this division was an infinite chasm. “The world” was
the place from which we had been called out. “Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord” (2nd Corinthian 6:17) was the mantra of fundamental Christianity – and the Pentecostals took it one step further, embracing as their own the snippet of scripture that proclaims believers to be a “peculiar people” (1Peter 2:9). The Church was special; the world profane. Within the walls of the church, we were among our own kind; and we felt lifted above life in the world.

This is exactly the kind of situation that Bonhoeffer detested. He stressed that Jesus came to show us how to be fully human; how to live out our faith fully immersed in the world. Bonhoeffer was convinced that for many of those in the church he served, faith was limited to that sphere of life that played out in “church.” This had come about, Bonhoeffer believed, through the formalization and ritualization of faith by religion. Because of this, he believed that the church had become irrelevant in the modern world. Part of the solution to this problem, he proposed, was to discover a “religionless Christianity.”

The idea of religionless Christianity was a radical idea that Bonhoeffer began to formulate during his time in prison. In his “Letters and Papers from Prison,” compiled and published after his death, we find this contemplation:

"What is bothering me incessantly is the question of what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inward and conscience—and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now cannot honestly describe themselves as religious any more… “Christianity” has always been a form—perhaps the true form of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically-conditioned and transient form of self-expression, and if therefore mankind becomes radically religionless—and I think that is already more or less the case (how else, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any religious reaction?)—what does that mean for Christianity?" (Bonhoeffer, Letters and papers from Prison, p. 140).

His life came to an end before he had a chance to formulate his ideas
completely, and there is to this day a lot of speculation as to what he meant by this term, or what “religionless Christianity” would look like in the world. According to Bonhoeffer, it at least involves “speaking in a new language…liberating and redeeming—as was Jesus’ language; it will shock people and yet overcome them by its power; it will be the language of the new righteousness and truth, proclaiming God’s peace for people and the coming of God’s kingdom” (p. 161). I believe that this new language must at last abandon the antiquated imagery of the blood sacrifice myth, a symbol which is no longer speaking or living in the 21st century.

In the work of Bonhoeffer, Bultman, and their contemporaries, and in the critical analysis of Biblical texts by the higher critics, we hear the echoes of stage four faith; the necessary coming of age process of stepping back from inherited faith and seeing it through the eyes of the maturing intellectual critic. Just as it is a painful stage for the individual, so is it a painful stage for a culture. For some, this critical process cannot be tolerated, and they flee back into the halls of stage two and stage three faith and bar the door. I believe that it is this very phenomena that is at the roots of the emergence of fundamentalism at the beginning of the 20th century.

For Christian fundamentalists, the suggestion that we must abandon the mythology about God and the work of Christ that for us has been so intricately tied up with our very conception of God is deeply threatening. By interpreting the Biblical texts literally, we have accepted the mythology as reality itself. This conception cannot be translated into modern life, because it is bound to an understanding of the world that is no longer intelligible. Bultmann (1958) supplies this example:

"According to mythological thinking, God has his domicile in heaven. What is the meaning of this statement? The meaning is quite clear. In a crude manner it expresses the idea that God is beyond the world, that He is transcendent. The thinking which is not yet capable of forming the abstract idea of transcendence expresses its intention in the category of space; the transcendent God is imagined as being at an immense spatial distance, far above the world; for above this world is the world of the stars, of the light which enlightens and makes glad the life of men. When mythological thinking forms the conception of hell, it expresses the idea of the transcendence of evil as the tremendous power which again and again afflicts mankind. The location of hell and of men who hell has seized is below the earth in darkness, because darkness is tremendous and terrible to men. These mythological conceptions of heaven and hell are no longer acceptable for modern men since for scientific thinking to speak of “above” and “below” in the universe has lost all meaning, but the idea of transcendence of God and of evil is still significant" (p. 20).

Like the mythological conception of heaven and hell, the work of Christ has
become unintelligible in the modern world because the language in which it is expressed no longer makes sense. If Jesus and his teachings are going to live again in the post-modern world – and I’m speaking here of the world outside the isolated realm of the religious world and it’s rituals – then we must strip the message of the jargon and dead symbolism within which it has been too long encrusted. This is what Bultmann referred to as “de-mythologizing” the New Testament; not for the purpose of eliminating the mythological statements, but in order to reinterpret them for a new age. This process of de-mythologizing the message of Jesus is the task at hand for the Church today. This is the task to which we must commit ourselves if we are to heal the liberal/fundamental rift in modern Christianity; even though it threatens us and leads us into unchartered territory. Only after we have taken the church deep into the forest of stage four faith and “sorted things out,” only after we have undertaken the painful task of dismembering Osiris, can our Christianity be reconstructed again. This is the precursor to stage five faith. This is the beginning stage of the religionless Christianity that Bonhoeffer envisioned, the palingenesis that Scheiermacher thought absolutely necessary. This is the rebirth of God in the post-modern world.