From Mark:

A post sent elsewhere by me trying to explain what an “Exiled Believer” is.

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I can only answer from my own point of view.

1. What do you “believers in exile” believe? Major premises

The term comes from John Shelby Spong in “Why Christianity Must Change Or Die” (HarperSanFrancisco : 1998)p. 20 ff entitled “On Saying the Christian Creed With Honesty” & “The Meaning Of The Exile And How We Got There” … and which describes me accurately ….

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So while claiming to be a believer (* I.e. a Christian) and still asserting my deeply held commitment to Jesus as Lord and Christ, I also recognize that I live in a state of exile from the presuppositions of my own religious past. I am exiled from the literal understandings that shaped the creed at its creation. I am exiled from the worldview in which the creed was formed.

The only thing I know to do in this moment of Christian history is to enter this exile, to feel its anxiety and discomfort, but to continue to be a believer. This is now my self-definition. I am a believer who increasingly lives in exile from the traditional way in which Christianity has heretofore been proclaimed. “A believer in exile” is a new status in religious circles, but I am convinced that countless numbers of people who either still inhabit religious institutions or who once did will resonate with that designation.

I see in this moment of Christian history a new vocation for me as a religious leader and anew vocation for the Christian church in all of its manifestations. That vocation is to legitimize the questions, the probings, and, in whatever form, the faith of the exiled believer. I believe that a conversation and a dialogue must be opened with those who cannot any longer give their assent to the premodern theological concepts that continue to mark the life of our increasingly irrelevant ecclesiastical institutions. I think the time has come for the Church to invite its people into a frightening journey into the mystery of God and to stop proclaiming that somehow the truth of God is still bound by either our literal scriptures or our literal creeds. …

Exile is never a voluntary experience. It is always something forced upon a person or a people by things or circumstances over which the affected ones have no control. … Exile is an enforced dislocation into which one enters without any verifiable hope of either a return to the past or an arrival at some future desired place. … The Christian faith came into existence in a world radically different from the one it now seeks to inhabit. … The biblical view of the universe was slowly and quietly discarded. … People began to grasp the fact that God did not sit on a throne beyond the sky looking down. Divine intervention became a problematic concept. As the knowledge of the universe grew, the religious community tried to adjust. Christianity began to shift God’s dwelling place form “up there” to “out there,” as if somehow that new spatial image made God more believable. Finally … distances overwhelmed even this concept of God’s dwelling place. …. Our embrace of the vastness of space had the effect, finally, of removing God from the sky and then increasingly even from our human consciousness. … Those biblical accounts were so obviously shaped by the ancient three-tiered worldview, whose shape Copernicus and Galileo and countless other had delineated, began to awaken to the fact that they could no longer use any of the traditional language about God and a heaven “out there” that so deeply filled our ancient faith system. That language had lost its meaning. …

After a while even the members of those congregations who continue to gather during a drought to pray for rain did not trust their work sufficiently to bring raincoats and umbrellas. …

Truth can never be deterred just because it is inconvenient. .. We like the Jews of old, had been forcibly removed from all that had previously given life meaning. …. No way out of this exile is either visible or guaranteed. ….

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Rather than believing dogma we are discussing the following:

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Twelve Theses – John Shelby Spong

from “Here I Stand” ( HarperCollins; New York:2000 pp. 468 -469)

Drawn from my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile

A Call for a New Reformation

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological God-talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So, the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history..

8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God’s image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one’s being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for cither rejection or discrimination.

Author’s Note: These theses posted for debate are inevitably stated in a negative manner. That is deliberate. Before one can hear what Christianity is one must create room for that bearing by clearing out the misconceptions of what Christianity is not. Why Christianity Must Change or Die is a manifesto calling the church to a new reformation. In that book I begin to sketch out a view of God beyond theism, an understanding of’ the Christ as a God presence and a vision of the shape of both the church and its Liturgy for the future.

[* This was more fully presented in his later book “A New Christianity For A New World”] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2. How do they view the bible?

The Bible …[is] … a collection of human responses to God (very human, some of them all too human), which we are at liberty to use in the process of formulating our own individual, unique response to God. We don’t do that by imitating these responses slavishly. I mean God, if he exists, doesn’t want innumerable clones of the apostle Paul. He wants us to respond to him, each of us in our own unique way. And we can use the Bible to do that, but we don’t do it by obeying it slavishly and blindly. – Peter Cameron “Heretic” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1994) p. 195

Peter Cameron is Australia’s own living “heretic” …according to our Presbyterian church. Google to find out more.

3. Where do they get their beliefs from?

Truth. All truth is God’s truth.

4. Is there much variance (of beliefs) amongst believers in exile?

Huge.

Also see:

http://virtualreligion.net/forum/ http://www.sof-in-australia.org/ http://www.robotwisdom.com/issues/crossan.html

http://www.contemporarytheology.org/

http://faithfutures.org/sinsofscripture.html

http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

5. How do they relate to God?

“In God we live and move and have our being.” …. as the bible and a pagan poet both say. God is the Ground of all Being (Tillich / existentialism)

Jesus is not God / YHWH but YHWH’s human Messiah.

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The Pre- and Post-Easter Jesus

Understanding and knowing Jesus involves history, tradition, and experience. -Marcus Borg

The pre-Easter Jesus means:

a.. The historical Jesus

b.. Jesus of Nazareth

c.. A first century Galilean Jew

d.. A figure of the past

The post-Easter Jesus means:

What Jesus became after his death, the Jesus of Christian experience and tradition.

In Christian experience people continue to experience Jesus as a living reality, as a figure of the present; as a spiritual living divine reality

In Christian tradition: Jesus is increasingly spoken of as a divine reality and eventually seen as “very God of very God.”

It is crucial to make this distinction, says Borg, or Jesus becomes unreal, incredible and inaccessible.

Compare pre- and post-Easter Jesus

Pre-Easter Jesus / Post-Easter Jesus

4 B.C.E. to 30 C.E. / 30 C.E. to present

Corporeal, human being of flesh and blood Spiritual / non-material reality

Finite and mortal / Infinite, eternal

Human / Divine

A Jewish peasant / King of Kings and Lord of Lords

Figure of the past / Figure of the present

Jesus of Nazareth / Jesus Christ

Monotheistic Jew / Becomes the second person of the trinity, “God with a human face”

Galilean Jew of the first century / “The Face of God” (metaphor based on 2 Cor. 4:6 Beholding the glory of God in the face of Christ)

From http://www.united.edu/portrait/compare.shtml

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