Introduction: Liberate Jesus
1Anne Rice, from a Facebook post, quoted in Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), 20.
2Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Nora Gallagher, Things Seen and Unseen (New York: Knopf, 1998); Diana Butler Bass, Strength for the Journey, 2nd ed. (New York: Church, 2017).
3Martin Kähler, Der Sogenannte Historische Jesus und der Geschichtliche, Biblische Christus, 1892.
4Barna Group, “What Do Americans Believe About Jesus? 5 Popular Beliefs,” Barna.com, April 1, 2015, https://www.barna.com/research/what-do-americans-believe-about-jesus-5-popular-beliefs.
5Pew Research Center, “Americans Say Religious Aspects of Christmas Are Declining in Public Life,” Pew Forum, December 12, 2017, https://www.pewforum.org/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-aspects-of-christmas-are-declining-in-public-life; Barna Group, “What Do Americans Believe About Jesus?”; Jeremy Weber, “Christian, What Do You Believe? Probably a Heresy About Jesus, Says Survey,” Christianity Today, October 16, 2018, https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2018/october/what-do-christians-believe-ligonier-state-theology-heresy.html.
6Philip S. Brenner, “Exceptional Behavior or Exceptional Identity?: Overreporting of Church Attendance in the U.S.” Public Opinion Quarterly (Vol. 75, No. 1, Spring 2011), 19–41. Also: “In U.S., Church Attendance Is Declining,” https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/pf_10-17-19_rdd_update-00-018.
Chapter 1: Friend
1Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927), quoted in Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2000), 2–3.
2Liz Carmichael, Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2004), 41, 221.
3Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 160.
4Dirk Baltzly and Nick Eliopolous, “The Classical Ideals of Friendship,” in Barbara Caine, ed., Friendship: A History (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–64, https://philarchive.org/archive/BALTCI-2v1.
5Char Adams, “Boy, 8, Comforts Classmate with Autism on First Day of School in Heartwarming Photo,” People.com, August 28, 2019, https://people.com/human-interest/conner-christian-autism-first-day-school-photo-kansas.
6William Rawlins, quoted in Julie Beck, “How Friendships Change in Adulthood,” Atlantic, October 22, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/how-friendships-change-over-time-in-adulthood/411466.
7Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Friend,” in E. Bethge, Friendship and Resistance: Essays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 99.
8Based on research by Matthew Brashears, of Cornell University, as reported in numerous articles including Susan S. Lang, “Americans’ Circle of Confidantes Has Shrunk to Two People,” Cornell Chronicle, November 1, 2011, https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/11/americans-circle-confidantes-has-shrunk-two-people; and Jeanna Bryner, “Close Friends Less Common Today, Study Finds,” LiveScience, November 4, 2011, https://www.livescience.com/16879-close-friends-decrease-today.html. The original study is Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review, June 1, 2006, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312240607100301.
9Paul Wadell, Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2002), 17.
10Wadell, Becoming Friends, 17.
11Quoted in Brian Edgar, God Is Friendship: A Theology of Spirituality, Community, and Society (Wilmore, KY: Seedbed, 2013), 119.
12Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Rediscovering Friendship: Awakening to the Power and Promise of Women’s Friendships (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 12.
13Benjamin Jowett, quoted in Edgar, God Is Friendship, 155.
14Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon, 2011).
15Dorothy Day, quoted in Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children, 329.
16Eric Elnes, “‘I Call You Friends,’ Part I: Our Savior, Our Friend,” http://countrysideucc.org/mediacast/i-call-you-friends-part-1-our-savior-our-friend.
Chapter 2: Teacher
1Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 188, 734.
2Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 20.
3John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963), 76.
4Robinson, Honest to God, 114.
5Robinson, Honest to God, 116.
6Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Christmas: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007), 41–42; also Marcus Borg, The Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), 214.
7Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, 203.
8Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, 205.
9Mahatma Gandhi, “The Jesus I Love,” Young India 13/53 (December 31, 1931): 429; see Robert Ellsberg, Gandhi on Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991), 22.
10Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014), 3.
11John Dominic Crossan, The Power of Parable: How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), 5.
12Carol Kuruvilla, “These Zen Buddhist Koans Will Open Your Mind,” Huffpost, October 31, 2015, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/zen-buddhism-koan_n_563251dce4b0631799115f3c.
13Peter Enns, How the Bible Actually Works (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2019), 5, 10.
14Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017), 196.
15Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 14.
16Julie Ingersoll, remarks to the AAR on the death of Wade Clark Roof, San Diego, CA, November 2019.
17Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987), 97.
18My favorite book on this subject is Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—a New Perspective on Christ and His Message (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2008). Inspiring and challenging, it offers truly helpful insights on the life of Jesus and Christian spiritual practices.
19I suppose, in some way it is a sort of sacred coincidence that my favorite Sunday school teacher was “Miss Jean,” as was the little boy’s teacher. She was not the same Miss Jean, however.
Chapter 3: Savior
1Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 131–32.
2Borg, Meeting Jesus Again, 133.
3One of my favorite discussions of the words “salvation,” “saved,” and “Savior” is found in Marcus Borg, Speaking Christian: Why Christian Words Have Lost Their Meaning and Power—And How They Can Be Restored (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011), 35–54.
4Larry Norman, “The Rock That Doesn’t Roll,” In Another Land (Solid Rock Records, 1976).
5Marcus Borg, Evolution of the Word: The New Testament in the Order the Books Were Written (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), 122.
6Borg, Evolution, 121–23.
7Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Z. Brettler, eds., The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 292–93.
8“Nathaniel William Taylor,” in Timothy L. Hall, ed., American Religious Leaders (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 356.
9Alexander Carmichael, “Blessing of the Kindling,” in “Celtic Prayers,” Vox Veniae, February 26, 2009, https://voxveniae.com/2009/02/celtic-prayers.
10Pelagius, “Letter to Demetrias,” in B. R. Rees, ed., Letters of Pelagius and His Followers (1991), quoted in J. Philip Newell, Listening for the Heartbeat of God (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1997), 14–15.
11The first theologian to argue the view that our notions of original sin were based in the experience of men and did not account for women was Valerie Saiving. In her groundbreaking 1960 article, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” she proposed that sin as pride and “original sin” were constructed from male understandings of dominance, and that female “sin” was not pride but erasure, the unwillingness or inability to be whole. Since its publication, the thesis has been refined and reargued, but the basic point stands: sin is a gender-, race-, and class-based construct in Christian history, one that has excluded the experiences of the oppressed and marginalized. “The Human Situation” has appeared in many collections, the most notable of which is Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
12Stephen Finlan, Options on Atonement in Christian Thought (Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 2007), 1–42.
13Finlan, Options on Atonement, 31.
14Finlan, Options on Atonement, 87.
15This idea goes a long way toward explaining why conservative evangelicals will not do anything to address climate change.
16Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
17Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love.
Chapter 4: Lord
1Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96–97, https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/pliny.html.
2N. T. Wright, “Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans,” http://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/paul-and-caesar-a-new-reading-of-romans.
3Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (NY: Macmillan, 1963; 1978), 99.
4Education was the shortest major I ever pursued—one semester. I’m very grateful to those who pursue teaching children as a career, and I’m equally confident that the world is a better place because I did not. I would have been a terrible elementary school teacher.
5Stephen Patterson, The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle Against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism (NY: Oxford, 2018), 108.
6Patterson, The Forgotten Creed, 110.
7Patterson, The Forgotten Creed, 115–17.
8“Romero’s Wisdom: Prayers,” U.S. Catholic, February 25, 2009, https://www.uscatholic.org/culture/social-justice/2009/02/romeros-wisdom.
9Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, rev. ed. (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 58.
10John Fugelsang, monologue.
11Ada María Isasi-Díaz, “Kin-dom of God: A Mujerista Proposal,” in B. Valentin, In Our Own Voices (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 173. See also a good discussion of Isasi-Díaz and the evolution of the language of kin-dom in Melissa Florer-Bixler, “The Kin-dom of Christ,” Sojourners, November 20, 2018, https://sojo.net/articles/kin-dom-christ.
12Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), quoted in Amy Peterson, “Kindness, Kinship, and the Boundaries of Justice,” Christian Century, January 16, 2020, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/first-person/kindness-kinship-and-boundaries-justice.
13George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980). Professor Marsden would later become my graduate adviser at Duke, where I earned my doctorate.
Chapter 5: Way
1See Brian D. McLaren, Is Jesus the Only Way? A Reading of John 14:6 (2019), privately published at brianmclaren.net.
2Craig Koester, The Word of Life: A Theology of John’s Gospel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), 211.
3Mary Field Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing (NY: Basic Books, 1986), 106.
4Marge Piercy, “Unlearning to Not Speak,” Circles on the Water (New York: Knopf, 1982).
5If you ever asked about “slaves,” as I did many times, you would be told that the verse now meant that “workers” or “servants” were to obey their employers, and to “Render service with enthusiasm, as to the Lord” (6:7).
6Meister Eckhart, Book of Secrets, “Your Soul’s Delight.”
7Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart, Classics of Western Spirituality (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1980), 213.
8Grace Andreacchi, “Hadewijch of Brabant and the High Palace of Love,” January 29, 2011, https://graceandreacchi.blogspot.com/2011/01/hadewijch-and-high-palace-of-love.html.
9“Come My Way” is a hymn text from a poem by George Herbert (d. 1633), fund in sixty hymnals; http://hymnary.org/text/come_my_way_my_truth_my_life.
10Peter Enns, The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our “Correct” Beliefs (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016), 21.
11Richard Rohr, “All Spiritual Knowing Must Be Balanced by Not-Knowing,” Center for Action and Contemplation, January 27, 2020, https://cac.org/all-spiritual-knowing-must-be-balanced-by-not-knowing-2020-01-27.
12Enns, Sin of Certainty, 18.
13Harvey Cox, The Future of Faith (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 6.
14Enns, Sin of Certainty, 135.
15Richard Rohr, “Soul Knowledge,” Center for Action and Contemplation, January 28, 2020, https://cac.org/soul-knowledge-2020-01-28.
16Henri Nouwen, Following Jesus: Finding Our Way Home in an Age of Anxiety (New York: Convergent, 2019), 45.
17Norman Wirzba, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016), 35.
18Wirzba, Way of Love, 41–42.
19Wirzba, Way of Love, 42.
20It is important to note that, although I happened to attend an evangelical school where there was a recognition of literary genres in the Bible and in my circles it was rare to find anyone who embraced literalism regarding Genesis, it is not at all uncommon for other evangelicals to believe fully in Adam and Eve, the snake, the apple, and physical exile from a garden called Eden. In certain ways, the biblical criticism of elite evangelicalism, especially in university settings, does not particularly diverge from that in more liberal branches of Christianity. But in most evangelical churches and on the ground in popular evangelicalism, literalism is normal.
21“The Chief Rabbi on Genesis,” The Jewish Chronicle, November 10, 2009, https://www.thejc.com/judaism/books/the-chief-rabbi-on-genesis-1.12309.
22Wirzba, Way of Love, 96.
23Mary Oliver, “The Journey,” Dream Work (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986): 38–39.
24Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 349.
25Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, xiii.
26Wirzba, Way of Love, 145.
27Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path: Rediscovering the Labyrinth as a Spiritual Practice (New York: Riverhead, 1995), xii.
28Antonio Machado, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antonio_Machado.
29John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.6.3.
Chapter 6: Presence
1An excellent book on “Shekhinah Christology” is Michael E. Lodahl, Shekhinah/Spirit: Divine Presence in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1992). Much of my discussion in this section was informed and inspired by Lodahl’s work.
2Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, God, Christ, Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 87.
3“A Jewish Take on Jesus: Amy-Jill Levine Talks the Gospels,” U.S. Catholic, September 24, 2012, https://www.uscatholic.org/church/2012/09/jewish-take-jesus-amy-jill-levine-talks-gospels.
4Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 164.
5McFague, Body of God, 164; emphasis hers.
6McFague, Body of God, 174.
7Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2020), 85.
8Julian of Norwich: Showings (Classics of Western Spirituality), eds., E. Colledge and J. Walsh (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977), 296.
9Shawn Madigan, ed., Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 191.
10Julian of Norwich: Showings, 54, excerpted in Madigan, Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets, 200.
11Julian of Norwich: Showings, 58, excerpted in Madigan, Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets, 202.
12Julian of Norwich: Showings, 60, excerpted in Madigan, Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets, 204.
13Julian of Norwich: Showings, 60, excerpted in Madigan, Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets, 204.
14Julian of Norwich: Showings, 63, excerpted in Madigan, Mystics, Visionaries and Prophets, 206.
15For a full exploration of maternal imagery for God, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982).
16Kathleen Norris, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work” (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1998), 76–77.
17Norris, Quotidian Mysteries, 22.
18J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, chap. 3.
19Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Hope in Disarray (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2020), 47.
20C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 52.
21Catherine Wright, Creation, God, and Humanity: Engaging the Mystery of Suffering Within the Sacred Cosmos (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 2017), loc. 2308, Kindle.
22Wright’s is the only sustained theological work drawing together these two terms; Creation, God, and Humanity, chap. 8.
23Steven D. Boyer and Christopher A. Hall, The Mystery of God: Theology for Knowing the Unknowable (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 6–7.
24Boyer and Hall, The Mystery of God, 43.
25Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, quoted in Boyer and Hall, The Mystery of God, 233.
26Marcus Borg, Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014), 41.
27Barbara A. Holmes, Race and the Cosmos: An Invitation to View the World Differently, 2nd ed. (Albuquerque, NM: CAC, 2020), 19.
Conclusion: The Universal Jesus
1This version is based on my handwritten notes (scribbles really) from the event. I believe there is video of the assembly, and my remarks may have been somewhat different in presentation than what I saved in writing (and that is not unusual for my speeches—I often leave the text when I am preaching or teaching). Whatever the differences between my notes and the video, however, the point of the Muslim barista’s story remains the same: women with words can be the source of spiritual revolution. This story also appears in Diana Butler Bass, Strength for the Journey, 2nd ed. (New York: Church, 2017), 287–90.
2The titles are from Matthew Fox, Paul Tillich, Rowan Williams, and Richard Rohr, respectively.
3Ilia Delio, The Emergent Christ: Exploring the Meaning of Catholic in an Evolutionary Universe (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 68.
4Delio, The Emergent Christ, 33–34.
5See James Fowler, Stages of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1981). Over the years, Fowler has been criticized for bias, especially in failing to bring the experiences of people of color, the disabled, and women to bear in his work. Fowler was popularized by M. Scott Peck in The Different Drum (New York: Touchstone, 1987). Although I have found Fowler helpful, the work in women’s spirituality, such as Mary F. Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing (New York: Basic, 1986), and Nicola Slee, Women’s Faith Development (New York: Ashgate, 2004), and theories of spiral dynamics, like Don Edward Beck and Christopher C. Cowan, Spiral Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), can supplement and correct some of the shortcomings in Stages of Faith.
6Quoted in Joan M. Martin, “Re-imaging the Church as Spiritual Institution,” in Church and Society, May/June 1994, 53.