It has been a pleasure to read two books by Robin R Meyers:
Saving Jesus from the Church, and
The Underground Church
The former is subtitled: How to stop worshiping Christ and start following Jesus. The latter book is subtitled: Reclaiming the subversive way of Jesus.
For those with a liberal and/or progressive understanding of the bible and theology these two volumes give shape and clarity to non-fundamentalist understanding of doctine and non-literalist ways of reading the bible. Along with Adrian Alker's: Is a radical church possible?, Marcus J Borg's: The Heart of Christianity and Richard Holloway's Doubts and Loves they form an excellent exposition of what is entailed in following Jesus and how it relates to the organisations called 'church'.
In Saving Jesus from the Church Meyers sets the tone by observing that in the Sermon on the Mount there is not a single word about what to to believe, only words about what to do. "It is a behavioural manifesto, not a a propositional one." By the time of the Nicene Creed there is not a single word about what to do, only words about what to believe. For Meyers Christianity has become search for individual salvation, for a passport to heaven, for individual victory over debt, obesity or low-esteem instead of being a radical movement for a collective victory over injustice, poverty, war or environmental degradation. In other words, the Kingdom on earth.
Following the Way of Jesus is not about individualistic, selfish, self-interest. It is about community, tackling social issues of poverty, exclusion, marginalisation, all issues on which Jesus showed radical concern and action.
However I do have reservations. Meyers explains the importance of seeking to discern in the bible the historical Jesus, the Jesus of the Way and differentiate him from the post-Easter Christ taken up in Pauline writings, a move away from doing to believing. A sensible differentation, but is it possble to identify the historical Jesus with any degree of clarity or centainty? I have my doubts.
As my blog readers well know I do not consider the bible to be a manual of behaviour to be followed slavishly. It is a guide to a body of thinking attributed inter alia to a person known as Jesus. That, I contend, is all we need to know. What persuades individuals to seek to emulate the teaching of Jesus may, or may not, be by what some consider to be divine inspiration? Is there an element of panentheism, is it purely a matter of biology, or the interplay of human experience and our minds?
