My Views about Christianity


I have served a Unitarian Christian church for over seven years. During my time at First Church, I articulated a liberal Unitarian Universalist Christian focus that was decidedly interfaith or, as liberal Christian scholar Marcus Borg says, was "non-exclusivist Christian."

You might like to know my views on Christianity and Jesus:

• I believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish rabbi and that he set out to reform Judaism of his time under the political and economic oppression of Roman occupation.
• I am a Christian in that I find great inspiration from the life and teachings of Jesus. As such, I keep current with liberal Christian scholarship about the historic Jesus. This current scholarship, by scholars like Elaine Pagels, Marcus Borg, John Domonic Crossan and Matthew Fox, articulates a Jesus who did not want to be worshiped as God but whose purpose was to show humanity the way to lives of forgiveness, humility, love, and compassion–to create, in truth, the realm of heaven on Earth.
• I believe that Jesus through living an exemplarily spiritual life took on the mantel of being anointed by the Spirit of God and became the “anointed one.” In Hebrew “Messiah” means the “anointed one” which is translated into Greek as christos or Christ. If Jesus had lived in Hindu or Buddhist countries of his time, this experience would have been called enlightenment or mahasamadhi.
• The possibility for spriritual transformation (aka, enlightenment, satori, samadhi) is the spiritual experience, I believe, that Jesus holds up to each person and that is the meaning of such sayings as “I am the way.”
• I reject a theology of a vengeful God who would demand a sacrifice of the Son of God to atone for the mythic original sin of Adam.(I attended a workshop led by John Domonic Crossan in which he called this doctrine, of original sin and atonement through sacrifice, “transcendental child abuse.”)
• I believe that Jesus showed each person the way to connect with God or the sacred in life through devotion, love, and right action.

This Jesus, that I find so inspirational, is the Jesus of early Unitarian and Universalist Christians, and this is the Jesus whose teachings are a spiritual guide for me. This is the Jesus that can inspire people today regardless of whether you are a Christian or not. This is the Jesus of an emerging Christian church movement led by people like Bishop Carlton Pearson–a former Evangelical Pentecostal Christian bishop who had a universalist epiphany.

Although I do not hold traditional Christian theologies of original sin, atonement, and the virgin birth, I believe that these theologies need to be understood and honored as part of the traditional Christian experience. I view traditional Christian theology as layers of interpretation added, over centuries, onto the original teachings and sayings of Jesus. Each layer has its own inspirational religious story.

Christianity, like most of the great world religions, has the marvelous property of adapting to the culture and its times. In the first century, the teachings of Jesus were overlaid by the myths of the time such as virgin birth, the atoning sacrifice of a savior, and the miracle worker. Christianity is a rich amalgam of Greek, Roman, and Jewish religious beliefs and philosophy overlaid onto the teachings of Jesus. This still is happening today. I once attended a Roman Catholic mass in a cathedral in Guatemala where at the end of the Catholic mass a Mayan procession occurred with statues of Mayan deities. This overlay of cultural rituals and myths is a rich source for religious inspiration and understanding.

I find the greatest inspirations, however, in the teachings and sayings of Jesus, rather than in traditional Christian theology. John Dominic Crossan observed that finding these teachings and sayings is like digging through layers in an archeological dig to find the original living layer which is the sayings of Jesus. These sayings and teachings were originally oral and then later written by early followers of Jesus. For me, the inspirational quest is to uncover the remnants of the teachings and sayings of Jesus. What was the man like? What did he say? How are his teachings relevant to the twenty-first century?

The more I study, the more I realize, that this original living layer of the teachings and sayings of Jesus is close to what early Unitarians and Universalist were saying about Jesus.

The theological reflection section of my doctoral dissertation dealt with how Unitarian Universalist congregations could reclaim the earlier liberal Christian voices of our movement without taking on traditional Christian theology. From my experience at First Church, I am convinced that many people are looking for a religious community that is comfortable with drawing inspirations from the teachings of Jesus, without the traditional theological overlay, and from other religious traditions as well.

If our Unitarian Universalist congregations were to reclaim some of the original Unitarian and Universalist Christian message and combine it with humanist and interfaith perspectives, we would position our movement to lead in what has become know as the emerging church movement.