CHAPTER 1: JESUS THE TEACHER, NOT THE SAVIOR
1. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), chap. 2.
2. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, trans. W. Montgomery (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 403.
3. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 21.
4. Bill McKibben, “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” Harpers, August 2005, p. 31.
5. Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 2.
6. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. xi.
7. For a more complete understanding of the breadth and depth of non-canonical gospels, see Robert J. Miller’s The Complete Gospels, 3d rev. ed. (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995).
8. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. xi.
9. John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), pp. 18–19.
10. Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002), p. 31.
11. Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 2.
12. For an excellent study of Ricoeur’s approach to scripture, see Mark Wallace, The Second Naiveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990).
13. Crossan, Jesus, pp. 27–28.
CHAPTER 2: FAITH AS BEING, NOT BELIEF
1. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 26.
2. Borg, Heart of Christianity, pp. 28–37.
3. Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 30.
4. To explore Jesus the Jew, Amy-Jill Levine, author of The Misunderstood Jew (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), suggests such titles as Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973); Jesus and the World of Judaism (London: SCM, 1983); The Religion of Jesus the Jew (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1993); Jesus in His Jewish Context (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Bernard Lee, The Galilean Jewishness of Jesus (New York: Paulist, 1988); Donald Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984); and the three volumes and counting of John Meier, A Marginal Jew (New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001).
5. Levine, Misunderstood Jew, p. 19.
6. Levine, Misunderstood Jew, p. 20.
7. John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), p. 15.
8. See Marcus Borg’s summary in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), chap. 2, p. 40, n. 6.
9. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), pp. 25–26.
10. Crossan, Jesus, p. 10.
11. Frederick Buechner, Peculiar Treasures: A Biblical Who’s Who (Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 69–70.
12. The New International Version has become the most popular “contemporary English” translation of the Bible for evangelicals. Red-letter editions of the NIV are just as popular now as those of the venerable King James Version were for earlier generations.
13. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 29.
14. The term “cognitive dissonance” was coined by Leon Festinger to describe a conflicted mental state in which one idea, usually an unexamined assumption, is brought into direct conflict with a new idea, creating dissonance. If a person believes, for example, that he or she values good health but is a smoker, the two ideas create cognitive dissonance that (as the opposite of harmony) needs to be resolved so that homeostasis (a state of equilibrium) can be restored. The person can give up smoking or give up the idea that it is unhealthy (retreat into denial about the dangers of smoking), but something has to “give.” In the spiritual world, dissonance can be created by telling stories in which people get more than they deserve or are too easily forgiven, stories that shatter conventional religious wisdom with subversive wisdom. When something “gives” here, listeners often learn new truths or a new way of seeing.
15. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 77.
16. Robin Scroggs, Paul for a New Day (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), p. 10.
17. Some scholars have wondered about the significance of a camel. What could a beast that stores up fat and fluids to carry it through a long journey represent?
18. See Luke 10:12; Matt. 10:15; Luke 10:13–14; Matt. 11:21–22; Luke 11:31; Matt. 12:42; Luke 11:32; Matt. 12:41.
CHAPTER 3: THE CROSS AS FUTILITY, NOT FORGIVENESS
1. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (Philadelphia: Fortress), quoted in John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 124.
2. Crossan, Jesus, p. 130.
3. John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), p. 97.
4. Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious, p. 98.
5. Crossan, Jesus, p. 145.
6. Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, trans. and ed. C. Braaton (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), p. 80.
7. Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), p. 10.
8. Crossan, Jesus, p. 146.
9. The complete and detailed explanation of this move from historical passion to prophetic passion to narrative passion can be found in Crossan, Jesus, pp. 145–51.
10. Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious, p. 107.
11. See Walter Wink’s trilogy, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Unmasking the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); and Engaging the Powers (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992).
12. Stephen Finlan, “Christian Atonement: From Metaphor to Ideology,” The Fourth R, July–August 2007, p. 3.
13. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 95.
14. Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 11.
15. Albert Noland, Jesus Before Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1978), p. 117.
CHAPTER 4: EASTER AS PRESENCE, NOT PROOF
1. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), p. 160.
2. Rudolph Bultmann, “The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus,” in Carl E. Braaten and Roy A. Harrisville, trans. and eds., The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ: Essays on the New Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Abingdon, 1964), p. 42.
3. Crossan, Jesus, p. 95.
4. Crossan, Jesus, p. 163.
5. Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 260.
6. Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 263.
7. Crossan, Jesus, p. 179.
8. James M. Robinson, “From Easter to Valentinus (or to the Apostles’ Creed),” Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982): 5–37.
9. Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 270.
10. Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 270.
11. Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 267.
12. Elaine Pagels, “The Controversy over Christ’s Resurrection: Historical Event or Symbol?” in Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 6.
13. N. T. Wright has written extensively from an evangelical perspective on the various beliefs in resurrection, or life after death, in numerous works. For an overview of pagan, Jewish, and early Christian perspectives, see his McCarthy lecture, “Jesus’ Resurrection and Christian Origins,” delivered March 13, 2002, in the Faculty of Theology of the Gregorian University.
14. Crossan, Jesus, p. 197.
15. Crossan, Jesus, p. 190.
16. Crossan, Jesus, pp. 190–91.
17. John Shelby Spong, Jesus for the Non-Religious (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), p. 118.
18. According to Robert Funk, “By the time the documents of the New Testament were written, belief in the resurrection of the body had become widespread. It seems to have been embraced by the Essenes at Qumran, by the Pharisees, and by the Jesus movement, but not by the Sadducees. The motivation for entertaining the idea was that the human sense of justice demanded that somebody, presumably God or the gods, rectify the injustices perpetrated in this life… The resurrection was a particularly congenial idea for the new Jesus movement… Jesus’ resurrection represented vindication for the persecuted and wrongfully executed man Jesus. It was compensation for his suffering. It also positioned Jesus as a cosmic judge who would return at the end of the age and preside over the resurrection of the righteous to eternal life and the resurrection of the wicked to eternal punishment” (Honest to Jesus, p. 275).
19. See Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989).
CHAPTER 5: ORIGINAL BLESSING, NOT ORIGINAL SIN
1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, New York: Image/Doubleday, 1959, repr. ed.), p. 15.
2. “Literalized” is a term used often by John Shelby Spong to describe what happens when nonhistorical Bible stories, meant to communicate deep spiritual truths, are treated as historical accounts.
3. See Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, NM: Bear, 1983).
4. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2d ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 3.
5. Augustine, Confessions, bk. V, p. 6.
6. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5.
7. Walter Wink, The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), p. 38.
8. Matthew Fox, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 13.
9. Archibald MacLeish, “Bubble of Blue Air,” Riders on Earth Together, Brothers in Eternal Cold, New York Times (Dec. 25, 1968).
10. Abraham Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 252.
11. Fox, Coming of the Cosmic Christ, p. 6.
12. Fox, Coming of the Cosmic Christ, p. 26.
13. Ken Wilber, “A Spirituality That Transforms,” http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/spthtr.cfm/p. 9.
CHAPTER 6: CHRISTIANITY AS COMPASSION, NOT CONDEMNATION
1. Søren Kierkegaard, The Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas Oden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 71.
2. Robin Meyers, “Virtual Virtuosity,” Christian Century, November 1, 2000, p. 1109.
3. Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), pp. 194–95.
4. Crossan, Jesus, p. 195.
5. See Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978), chaps. 2–3.
6. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 48.
7. Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” Christian Century, February 25, 1986, p. 201.
8. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p. 50.
9. See Jerome Neyrey, The Social World of Luke-Acts (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), p. 279.
10. Neyrey, Social World of Luke-Acts, pp. 278–79.
11. See John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).
12. William Sloane Coffin Jr., Credo (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), p. 43.
CHAPTER 7: DISCIPLESHIP AS OBEDIENCE, NOT OBSERVANCE
1. Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 55, 57.
2. Dillard, Holy the Firm, p. 57.
3. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 30.
4. Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 19.
5. Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk, p. 40.
6. This was a favorite expression of Dr. Ernest Campbell, former minister of the Riverside Church of New York City.
7. See Warren Carter, Matthew and Empire (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001), chap. 7.
8. Carter, Matthew and Empire, p. 112.
9. Carter, Matthew and Empire, p. 122.
10. William Sloane Coffin Jr., Credo (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), p. 151.
11. N. T. Wright, “Kingdom Come,” Christian Century, June 17, 2008, p. 29.
12. Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 241.
13. Funk, Honest to Jesus, pp. 245–46.
14. This is a notion developed in my last book, Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister’s Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2006).
15. See Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1989).
16. Curtis White, “Hot Air Gods,” Harpers, December 2007, p. 14.
CHAPTER 8: JUSTICE AS COVENANT, NOT CONTROL
1. Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 127.
2. Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 130.
3. John Dominic Crossan makes this point in several books and his essay “Jesus and the Kingdom,” in Marcus Borg, ed., Jesus at 2000 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), pp. 52–53.
4. William Sloane Coffin Jr., Credo (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2004), pp. 50–51.
5. Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
6. Bellah, Habits of the Heart.
7. See Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004).
8. Borg, Heart of Christianity, p. 223.
CHAPTER 9: PROSPERITY AS DANGEROUS, NOT DIVINE
1. “Prosperity Gospel,” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, August 17, 2007, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1051/feature.html.
2. “Prosperity Gospel.”
3. Tom Carted, ed., 2,200 Quotations from the Writing of Charles H. Spurgeon (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1988), p. 216.
4. Ben Witherington, “What’s Wrong with Prospering? The Gospel According to Joel Osteen,” March 30, 2006, http://benwitherington.blogspot.com.
5. Ralph Blumenthal, “Joel Osteen’s Credo: Eliminate the Negative, Accentuate Prosperity,” New York Times, March 30, 2006.
6. Robert Franklin, “The Gospel of Bling,” Sojourners Magazine, January 2007.
7. Curtis White, “Hot Air Gods,” Harpers, December 2007, p. 13.
8. Kenneth Copeland, The Laws of Prosperity (Fort Worth, TX: Kenneth Copeland Publications, 1974), p. 51.
9. Michael Dyson, quoted in “Prosperity Gospel.”
10. Franklin, “The Gospel of Bling.”
11. Al Gore, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, Oslo, Norway, December 10, 2007.
12. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 94.
13. Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, p. 114.
14. Walter Brueggemann, To Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly (New York: Paulist, 1986), p. 5.
15. E. J. Lapsansky, “Past Plainness to Present Simplicity: A Search for Quaker Identity,” in E. J. Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanch, eds., Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 4.
16. William Penn, No Cross, No Crown, ed. R. Selleck (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1981), p. 85.
17. John Woodman, “A Plea for the Poor,” in Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 255.
CHAPTER 10: RELIGION AS RELATIONSHIP, NOT RIGHTEOUSNESS
1. This metaphor comes from a chapter on parenting in my earlier book Morning Sun on a White Piano: Simple Pleasures and the Sacramental Life (New York: Doubleday, 1998), chap. 4.
2. See Aristotle’s discussion of friendship in his Nichomachean Ethics, especially bks. VIII and IX.
3. Karen Armstrong, in a lecture at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, February, 2002.
4. Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), p. 295.
5. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner, 1958).
6. “I and Thou,” Time, January 23, 1956.
7. David Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 82.
8. Buber, I and Thou, p. 109.
9. Martin Barich, “A Few Thoughts on Martin Buber’s I and Thou,” http://www.rjgeib.com/barich/papers/martin-buber.html.
10. Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), p. 118.
11. Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, p. 122.
12. Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, p. 123.
13. Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 4, 26.
14. Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), p. 51.
15. Funk, Honest to Jesus, p. 311.
EPILOGUE: A PREACHER’S DREAM: FAITH AS FOLLOWING JESUS
1. From a sermon by Fred B. Craddock and paraphrased from a collection of stories entitled Craddock Stories, ed. Mike Graves and Richard Ward (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2001), and used with Dr. Craddock’s kind permission.