How Great Entrepreneurs Think

Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, has been studying entrepreneurs and how they think. Her conclusion:

Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don't start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies. By contrast, corporate executives—those in the study group were also enormously successful in their chosen field—use causal reasoning. They set a goal and diligently seek the best ways to achieve it...

Would you describe Jesus as a master entrepreneur or a corporate executive? Was he developing goals on the fly or did he have it all planned out from the beginning? At what point did he see a cross in his future? Was this always the short-term goal on the way to resurrection and a church? Or did he start out with other goals - say forming a renewal movement - and eventually come to see his own martyrdom as necessary in order to jump-start something bigger? Was the cross a calculated risk or a painful but necessary step on the way to a global organization?

I'd say he was closer to entrepreneur.

When Liberation Movements Go Viral

One of the interesting scholarly and blog conversations that never ends is how much if any of the gospel accounts of Jesus life are based on things Jesus actually did or said. How much can we really know? There is one kind of this conversation that takes place on a level that debates whether Jesus even existed. You can read some of that conversation here and here if you are interested. I enjoy reading the posts but confess that even as a very liberal pastor who cares about historical accuracy I am hopelessly biased on this issue.

Recently, though, I have been reading Richard Horsley's book Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant, and the Hope of the Poor. and have been interested to see Horsley address Jesus' "fame". Our earliest gospel Mark states in the very first chapter that Jesus "fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee." Is this true? Is it possible? How popular was Jesus? How much of a "scene" did he make? How much of a movement did he have?

Here is Horsley:

Toward the beginning of Mark's story, Jesus' mission appears to be "headquartered" in the village of Capernaum, at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, along the frontier with Herod Philip's territory from the east. From this base, the mission and communication spread into surrounding villages. Mark's Gospel thus paints a picture different from the normally limited communication from village to village in agrarian societies: the interaction among Jesus, the disciples, and the responsive people generated an expanding network of communication around the countryside.

...In these early accounts of the mission, Jesus delegates disciples to spread the proclamation and manifestation of the kingdom into other villages, where they are to work closely and stay with the people. Jesus' mission thus involved an intentional orchestration of communication across village lines. Though exaggerated, Mark's representations of rapidly expanding communication at least partly what was happening in Jesus' mission itself.

Horsley cites a book I haven't read, Domination and the Arts of Resistance by James C. Scott, as evidence of how "rumor" spreads among disparate communities and inflames hope and emboldens beaten down peasants to take action as they hear news of resistance and victory from other communities.

Horsley thinks that this is what was happening with the Jesus movement in peasant villages around Galilee. His kingdom movement reminded the people that the were (or could choose to live) under the direct rule of God not Rome or the temple aristocracy. It inspired hope and action in the form of sharing of goods and healing both physical and spiritual. The news about Jesus was going out through intentional mission and through the peasant rumor mill. The Jesus movement, Horsley suggests, was real; it was spreading; and hence it was quickly and correctly perceived to be a genuine threat by the religious and political authorities.

I find Horsley's explanation plausible. It could have happened this way. I certainly resonate with his description of Jesus' movement as being centered around spiritual/political/economic liberation.

I also can't help but make the connection between Horsley's description of the surprising and almost explosive spread of the Jesus movement and events in the middle east right now. If you wanted to see evidence of how a liberation movement can spread rapidly and seem to come out of nowhere we are watching it happen before our eyes. I keep asking 'why now'? What has changed between one year ago or five years ago and today? Certainly the technology that has fueled the spread of "rumor" has penetrated these societies enough to make it possible to keep the news flowing and to make it nearly impossible to suppress from above. But there also has to be an element of frustration and anger and hope reaching a certain critical mass where it just needs to find an outlet. The good news about this movement is that it has been mostly peaceful, making a mockery of those who equate Islam with violence. Even better some of the government response has been peaceful. Alas this is not true everywhere.

Still, to watch a movement go 'viral' in this manner is a reminder that it really does happen this way. It very well could have happened this way with Jesus.

Jesus the Village Organizer

I am about half-way through reading Richard Horsley's latest book Jesus and the Powers: Conflict, Covenant and the Hope of the Poor. Horsley does a masterful job of spelling out the economic/political/religious milieu of Jesus. He provides a forceful reminder of the fact that the Temple in Jesus' day (and previously) was very much under the control of the Roman occupiers who supported the king who built and maintained it and appointed the high priests who ran it. Taxes were collected in the temple for the empire. The Temple was indeed much more than a house of God.

Horsley depicts the scribes and the Pharisees as the intellectuals very much caught in the middle. Their livelihood depended on their service to the Roman-appointed leadership. But they were also keeping alive a religious tradition that breathed through and through with a message of liberation from oppression. They very much feared the results of active resistance and so for the most part collaborated to help put it down, but they also occasionally were moved to actual resistance as when students of the teachers Judas son of Sariphaeus and Matthias son of Margalothus tore down Herod's imperial eagle after his death. (909 Kindle)

Meanwhile out in the villages of Galilee and Judea the peasants attempted to eke out an existence that was made more and more desperate by the forced taxation that supported the temple and the Hellenization projects of Herod. Most couldn't read but they kept alive the ancient remembered traditions of resistance and liberation:

The Village communities in which the Galilean and Judean peasants lived provided the sequestered sites in which they could cultivate their popular tradition and develop their "raw" resentment into a "cooked" discourse of their desire for dignity and hopes for deliverance. It was in the "hidden transcript" of the continuing cultivation of popular Israelite tradition in the village communities that past deliverance was remembered, and hopes for a better life nurtured. This was the fertile soil from which movements could grow... (1005 Kindle)

In a period of time that spanned more than a century before and after the time of Jesus a series of peasant-led resistant movements, some messianic and some prophetic, came out of the villages and succeeded for varying periods of time in taking back village life from the Romans and their wealthy Jewish client leaders. Each, however, was eventually crushed by the overwhelming force and brutality of the Roman legions.

The Jesus movement was one of these peasant-led movements. Horsley says it differed from the other resistance movements in this way:

Yet there was a significant difference between Jesus and his movement and the (other) popular prophetic movements. Both drew on the popular memory of Moses (and Joshua or Elijah). But, whereas the other prophets led their followers out of their villages and into the wilderness or up to the Mount of Olives in anticipation of God's new acts of deliverance, Jesus focused his mission on village communities and their concerns. Throughout Mark's narrative of Jesus mission in Galilee and beyond, Jesus works in villages and synagogues (which were village assemblies, not buildings.) (1149 Kindle)

Jesus sent his envoys out to work in the villages. His renewal movement was about reclaiming covenant relations, social and economic, among the people living there. He knew well the indignities of village life under Roman role. His healing acts symbolized this:

This is perhaps nowhere more vividly expressed than in the two interwoven episodes of the twelve-year-old woman and the woman who had been hemorrhaging for twelve years (Mark 5:21-43). Both women are representative of the people, as symbolized by the "twelve." In both, the power of life is ebbing away. The lifeblood of the older woman had been steadily drained from her. The younger woman, just at the age when she should be married and being reproducing life in Israel, was "at the point of death." These are the representative figures of Israel in the Galilean villages where crowds eagerly greet Jesus. (1215 Kindle)

Significantly, Horsley notes in these stories that the initiative to be healed comes from the people themselves and healing takes place in an interaction between Jesus and the people who respond to his message of hope and his genuine authority but are not merely passive recipients of Jesus power.

Interesting read so far... I see Horsley making his own way here rejecting both the wisdom Jesus who left us memorable and timeless parables and aphorisms and the failed apocalyptic prophet whose martyrdom spawned a movement. Jesus, in Horsley's treatment, created an indigenous kingdom movement that spoke to concerns of peasant/village life.

Horsley is great in the book's beginning describing the history of Israel's formation in reaction to a repeated history of imperial rule from external (Babylon, Egypt, etc.) and internal (David, Solomon, etc.) powers. As I mentioned earlier I found his treatment of the function of the temple as a seat and symbol of that imperial power to be particularly enlightening.

unChristian America

Ross Douthat surveys two recent sociology of religion books on the state of Christianity in American culture and comes to this conclusion:

...this month’s ubiquitous carols and crèches notwithstanding, believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation. The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities, and where the idea of a single religious truth seems increasingly passé.

Or to put it another way, Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

This is an assessment I have shared with my congregation on numerous Sunday mornings and it is a common refrain in post-modern church circles as well as the anabaptist circles I have contact with (where the assessment is greeted by a rowdy cheer growing out of a belief that this is precisely where Christianity belongs).

It is worth pointing out, though, that there is at least one enormous difference for Christianity between now and then: then it was a new movement with a unique message about God and about how to live together in the world. It's organization, its member-care and its outreach were all revolutionary. As Rodney Stark has reminded us the Christians made a very real-world positive impact on the culture; the citizens of Rome had never seen anything quite like the Christians before.

In marked contrast, today, as we Christians find ourselves in the West increasingly marginalized and having to make the case for why anyone should participate in our communities, a large part of the challenge comes from carrying around 2000 years of baggage. It is one thing to to be a brand-spanking-new Christian and have to contrast yourself with the pagans and Jews everyone knows; it is another thing altogether to have to explain how you are different than thousands of different Christian sects and perhaps more importantly how you choose to account for the accretions of two thousand years of Christian culture, a culture that for all its accomplishments has at moments a shameful history on many issues.

Sometimes I wonder if a new religion might someday burst on the scene in the way Christianity did 2000 years ago and rock the world. Or perhaps it already has and is just waiting for its Paul. Or perhaps that new religion is science and technology and the manner in which we live, work and play in its world and accept its worldview.

In the meantime those of us in Christian communities must choose what to do with our baggage and how to respond and hopefully thrive in a challenging culture. I am sure it is my own particular heritage bleeding through, but I think the way forward is going to be found in communities that gather for food, stories, music, art, and ritual, that focus on serving others, and that teach and practice non-violence. There is nothing earth-shattering in this; it certainly isn't new news or coming from the latest marketing research, but it is faithful to Jesus and the best of our Christian culture, and when it is done well it just works.

Paradise is Not Lost

From my reading of Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love for This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, I am not quite ready to get the the death of Jesus yet and how focusing on it dramatically changed Christian faith. Another quote:

In the sixth century St. Apollinare Nuovo Church, at the edge of the old city (Ravenna, Italy), we found the earliest surviving life story of Jesus depicted in images. Near the ceiling on both sides of the basilica nave, thirteen rectangular mosaics marched from the chancel toward the main door. We examined each of the twenty-six panels closely. On the right wall near the chancel, an image of the last supper began the thirteen scenes of his Passion. At panel ten we encountered Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross for Jesus to Golgotha. We expected to see the Crucifixion on panel eleven. Instead, we were confronted by an angel who sat before the tomb. The apparition spoke to two women swaying forward like Gospel singers. We too leaned forward in astonishment and remembered what the angel had said: "I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here" (Matt. 28:5-6). The remaining panels showed the risen Christ visiting his followers in the stories of doubting Thomas and the road to Emmaus.

We found no crucifixion in any of Ravenna's early churches. The death of Jesus, it seemed, was not a key to meaning, not an image of devotion, not a ritual symbol of faith for the Christians who worshipped among the churches' glittering mosaics. The Christ they saw was the incarnate, risen Christ, the child of baptism, the healer of the sick, the teacher of his friends, and the one who defeated death and transfigured the world with the Spirit of life.

It seems that nowhere in early Christian art is there a focus on the death of Jesus. Not until the 10th century. This is one of these pieces of information that I find astonishing - that it is so and that I am just learning it now. Early church art focused on recreating paradise. When Christians walked into worship spaces they were reminded that with their baptisms they had re-entered paradise here and now and that their ethical living helped to make paradise a reality for themselves and others. Paradise was not lost. Their sin and the sin of the world did not so mar earthly life that they longed for the afterlife or even some kind of future eschatological moment. They were already living in a realized eschatology.

The afterlife was real of course, and full of saints. But even the saints were present in this life through icons and images. They were a part of this world's paradise made possible by the resurrection of Jesus and by those who lived resurrected lives.

One important insight to keep in mind here is that we are talking about a period in history where virtually everyone is illiterate. When we think of Christian history we tend to focus on the writings of early Christian leaders. As important as these writings are to get a sense of the emerging doctrinal decisions and the battles over who and what is orthodoxy, the vast majority of early Christians had their faith shaped by the art and liturgy of their worship spaces, which is why so much money was put into building beautiful spaces. And the predominant images found in those spaces were about living in paradise. Bread, wine, water, art, and the sharing of resources made paradise a reality.

I am also reminded of one helpful critique of liberal Christianity coming from the direction of the emergent folks. Too much of liberal Christianity is emotionally dry with its focus on word and intellect. There is more to life than being smart and right on the issues. We need to be engaged emotionally through music, poetry, and art and be reminded constantly that there is beauty in the world and that experiencing it is transformative in a way far deeper than any intellectual conversion experience. Which is not to say that engaging the mind cannot also be a thing of beauty - it is - but we want and need more. It seems the early Christians knew this.

Abundant Life Here and Now

I am currently reading Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love for This World for Crucifixion and Empire by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker. The authors begin with the observation that images of the crucified Christ don't appear in early Christian art for nearly a thousand years after the time of Jesus; then they become predominant. Why is this? What changes within Christianity bring it about?

The first Christian art from the catacombs through the building of worship spaces emphasized the restoration of paradise on earth as a result of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Images of loaves and fishes, water and wine, the rivers of life, trees and animals were used in Christian art to created the sensation of paradise restored. In the same way icons brought the heavenly paradise down to earth for those who touched and prayed to them. To become a Christian brought not only the promise of a future paradise but life in paradise now as part of a community that was attuned through spiritual disciplines to see and participate in paradise and to make it a reality through the practice of what the authors call ethical grace.

They suggest that this same spirit animates much of the New Testament. For example here is what they have to say about John 3:16:

Today this passage is invariably interpreted to mean that God placed Jesus in the world to die on the cross, but at no point does this story mention death. It does not use the Greek word paradidomai, the word that John's Gospel specifically uses to describe the action of those who "gave" or "handed over" Jesus to be crucified. John 19:16 makes it clear that Pilate, not God, "handed him over to them to be crucified." Jesus' words to Nicodemus are about birth and life, not death and afterlife. They reiterate the themes of Creation and the power to be born of God that we spoke of in Chapter 1. God loves the world, the kosmos, and loves the Son, to who he gives "the Spirit without measure" (John 3:34).

In John's Gospel Jesus incarnates wisdom, turns water into wine, feeds the multitudes, demonstrating in various ways that he has come to restore paradise, abundant life, to this life.

Unfortunately, the authors say, paradise is eventually replaced with images of the suffering and tortured Jesus. When and why that happens in a future post.

The thesis of this book reminds me of my trip to Rome several years ago. As we visited the catacombs and churches and the Vatican Art Museum to see early Christian art our guide, Grady Snyder, kept asking us "what are you not seeing here?" There were no crosses anywhere to be found. The promise of new life not a focus on Jesus' suffering and death was what attracted converts to Christianity.

It seems to me that this is or should be one of the predominant themes of progressive Christianity. I think we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

On Being a Good Example

Yesterday I started reading Philip Gulley's If the Church Were Christian: Rediscovering the Values of Jesus. In his opening chapter he tells the story of being a young person in church hearing a preacher say "Some people will tell you Jesus is only an example for how we should live. But anyone can be an example."

Thirty years later Gulley says he knows better than ever that this isn't true. Living the kind of virtuous life that makes one a worthy example for others to follow is very difficult. To say that it somehow diminishes the story of Jesus if he is 'only' a moral example is to ignore the simple fact that we rarely encounter individuals who so embody the qualities associated with Godly virtue. In our lifetimes we are fortunate if we come under the influence of a few who come close.

If Jesus was one of these rare individuals - and I suspect he was - it is not hard to understand why he would have attracted both followers and enemies. Authentic individuals who actually live by the highest values attract company. We want to be in their presence. We want to learn from them. We want to be like them.

They also attract enemies because they have authentic power, not supernatural power or power obtained through violence, wealth or stealth, but the kind of power that comes naturally from becoming during their life-times a brighter and clearer light, the kind of light that stands in sharp contrast to and exposes the corruption and dishonesty and violence that so often are the tools of those who are in power.

It has been my experience that taking Jesus off the Only Son of God pedestal and making him fully human actually makes it much for difficult to be a follower. What we are being called to do as followers is not to believe in him but to live as he lived. Imagine what the world would be like if Christians simply lived more simply, or forswore the use of violence of any kind. The world as we know it today would truly be turned upside down. We would say the kingdom of God has come on earth.

Am I asking too much? The world is fallen and we need the grace of God to save us? Then we are looking for the easy way out - or up. Making Jesus into our ticket to heaven is cheap grace. Letting him be an uncommonly virtuous son of God who challenges the rest of us sons and daughters of God by word and example to live as he lived calls us to a lifetime of growth and transformation.

Oh, that Jesus would 'just' be an example that we spent our lifetimes emulating.

Fish Story

We have a children's story in worship every week and thankfully I have nothing to do with scheduling it and we have many people willing to take a turn on the schedule. But last week when the children came forward for a story no adult stood up so I took an impromptu turn.

What to talk about? Well I told a story from my fly-fishing experience the previous week. I asked the children if they ever fish or like to fish. Then I told them that I like to fish and I usually make it a practice to 'catch and release' the fish I catch, and I explained what that meant.

Then I related that during the past week I had caught a fish that did not survive as I brought it into my net. I talked about being sad about the fish dying. I then told them that I kept the fish, brought it home, and ate it for dinner.

I asked them if they liked to eat fish or burgers or chicken. I asked them if they knew that the meat they ate was once a living animal. I talked some about how important it is for us to know that we live in a web of life where some animals give their lives so that other animals can live. I finished up by talk about my feelings of reverence for life and explained what that word meant to me.

Did they get it? I had one parent relate to me that their child had not a clue what I was talking about apart from fishing. I had another parent tell me that they thought I was making a commercial for PETA. Ha. I had another parent tell me that just the previous week their child had said to them after watching a tv show that had chickens running around that the child had said "chicken, we eat chicken" which had prompted an interesting conversation and gratitude from the parent that I had picked up the subject while it was fresh on the child's mind.

I have vivid childhood memories of working on relatives farms and learning first hand that the animals I enjoyed (cows) or feared (pigs) would soon be on the dinner table. I have the same kind of childhood memories from fishing and hunting. I learned about the cycle of life; I learned about reverence as I watched animals die so that I could eat.

I also have vivid memories of taking my suburban raised daughter to a farm when she was a youngster and her breaking into tears as she protested that "my milk does not come from a cow it comes from the store." Living in an urban area there can be a certain disconnect between the food we eat and the real life and work that brings us that food.

I think we have a responsibility in our religious communities to somehow make that connection. Whether it is our food or our consumer lifestyle or our energy consumption: some animal or some plant or some person is giving their life so we can live. I think about that every time I go fishing.

How Diverse Can a Church Be?

James McGrath asks this question on his blog: how diverse can a church be? I think there are couple of ways of thinking about an answer. One is that it depends a lot on the emotional health an intelligence of the people in leadership at the church. Emotionally healthy people have clearly self-defined values and boundaries and are not threatened by people who have different beliefs. If the leadership is healthy they can model healthy dialogue and conflict and the congregation can tolerate, perhaps even welcome, a certain amount of diversity. On the other hand if the leadership isn't emotionally healthy then they will probably be threatened by diversity and seek to enforce adherence to a more narrow theology or doctrinal position. (And this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative theology; it is true across the spectrum. Emotionally healthy leadership seems to attract more diversity of thought and opinion around whatever the spiritual orientation is.)

Another way to think about it is what I learned from evangelical church planters whose training I attended nearly 20 years ago. At the time there was no training available for liberal church planters, at least not that I was aware of. The one teaching that was driven home over and over was that the group of people planting the church must all agree on essential matters of theology and doctrine. Therefore, I was taught, it was very important to hammer out a set of core values that clearly define where you stand on how you read scripture, understand Jesus, think about culture-war issues like homosexuality, etc. The leadership needs to agree on these issues and then when the church gets underway new members also need to be in essential agreement. It is better to say to someone "You know there is another church down the road that might better meet your needs" rather than be so desperate for new people that you welcome those who have fundamental disagreements about core issues. I heard these trainers say that there would be more than enough diversity to deal with even among those who are in agreement on core values.

For the most part we followed this advise as we started Open Circle. I knew starting the church that there were certain issues that were important to me that I no longer wanted to have to be fighting about in a congregation: gays would be welcome, I would not be interpreting scripture in a literal way, and Christianity was not the only valid spiritual path. I was clear about these issues as I talked to potential members and those who stayed were in agreement on these issues. When we had enough of a core group we worked out a set of core values and then we clearly published these in all of our literature. We still do.

In some ways our congregation is not very diverse. We are mostly white, theologically and politically liberal. In other ways we are quite diverse. We have a lot diversity in religious background: Catholic, many flavors of Protestant, pagan, atheist, Jewish. We have a growing diversity in age. We started out with mostly boomer individuals and families; now we run the gamut from young families to seniors, singles, cohabitating and married couple with and without children, gay and straight. We have city dwellers, suburbanites and folks coming from small towns and the country, some driving 30 miles to get to church.

I have found it to be true that even with clearly defined core values there is plenty of diversity that presents continuing opportunities for dialogue and challenges for the congregation as we chart our way forward. We have constant conversations around the issues like these: what does it mean to be a Christian or a follower of Jesus today; how do we relate to our denomination, The Church of the Brethren; how do we best deploy our people resources to serve church and community? We have some strong differences of opinion in the congregation about these issues.

I wish we were more racially diverse than we are and interestingly enough, we were more racially diverse when we started than we are now 17 years later. I am not sure why that is but I would guess that part of it has to do with the fact that I do not have great cross-cultural skills and it is not one of the passions that drives me as a pastor, like say being welcoming to glbt folk does.

It is interesting to note that my answer to this question doesn't even touch on some of the issues found in this response.

Atheist Delusions

I have been reading David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies. Hart is taking on the so-called New Atheists who argue that Christian history is marked by its violence, ignorance, and opposition to science. I am only about half-way in but I find Hart making some good points.

One is that the Christian way of life was a marked upgrade from the pagan way of life that preceded it. He makes basically the same point here that Rodney Stark makes when Stark talks about how the Christians and pagans responded so differently when the Roman empire was visited by the plagues. The pagans fled for the hills, including the pagan doctors. The Christians stayed and took care of the sick. The result was that many of the pagans who survived converted to Christianity. It was a better way of living.

Why did the Christians stay and take care of the sick? Because at the heart of the Christian story there is a suffering God. On the surface it sounds like a terrible marketing strategy: my God gets hung on a cross, suffers and dies; how great can he be? It is a stumbling block. But in practice it leads to care for the suffering because this is where God is present. So widows are cared for, orphans are cared for, sick people are cared for. Christians are to stop supporting the games where humans suffer and die for sport. Christianity treats humans with more dignity; human consciousness evolves thanks to Christianity.

Christian culture brings us not only hospitals and better care for the suffering but a flourishing of the arts: literature, music, painting and sculpture. Creativity is encouraged; beauty is valued. And so the argument goes. The end of the pagan era was not the end of a golden era replaced by a thousand years of night until the enlightenment once again lit the mind on fire. The Christian era was in many ways a huge step up for humanity.

Another point, on Christian opposition to science, Hart essentially asks this question: in what culture did Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler to name just a few history-making scientists, make their history? Christian culture. Where did they do their work? In universities created and funded by Christian institutions. Where they had remarkable freedom to study and write as they pleased. Hart talks at some length about Galileo's silencing at the hands of Pope Urban VIII over the issue Galileo's support of Copernicus' heliocentric theory. Hart repeats an argument I have read before that Galileo's problem was not in holding a view of the earth's place in the universe that the church found threatening. His problem was that he was a pompous ass who needlessly offended his erstwhile friend and patron the Pope. Even then his punishment was very mild. The pope and the church were not anti-science.

Hart acknowledges the reality of violence at the hands of Christians against Jews, witches, and Muslims, and he discusses the causes and consequences of the "dark ages" in western Christianity after the fall of the Roman empire. He notes, though, that Christian culture thrived in the East, and that this was gifted to the Muslims in their conquests and expansions. He traces the movement of ancient literature and learning back to the West during the Crusades. And that is as far as I have gotten.

One thing I will say for Hart and I am not sure this is a complement, he can match Dawkins and Hitchens snark for snark. The cultured despisers have no monopoly on the ability to hurl witty epithets at opponents.

Although I haven't finished the book my hunch is that Hart is worried about our future as we move into a post-Christian world that is losing its grounding in Christianity's great idea that charity and self-less love is the heart of God and the heart of a better way of living. I don't know the answer to that. Are we falling backward or are we evolving into a better future? I would say there is no way of knowing.

I wonder, though, if it is possible to be a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian and keep hope alive. The theology of Christianity doesn't work so well for me anymore, at least if that theology includes some kind of belief in a supernatural world, but the incarnational side that has God becoming human (in us all) and more particularly God being present in suffering and our calling to respond to that with love and service, that works for me. It is enough for me but is it enough for Christianity and for our culture?

I wonder to what hope there is when so many Christians identify their Christianity with militarism and capitalism. Christianity was once a better idea. It might still be but how would we know when you can't tell Christians apart from anyone else?

The Church and Social Justice

The Washington Post On Faith section is currently featuring a discussion about Glenn Beck's recent statement that Christians should flee churches where social justice is featured. Southern Baptist leader Al Mohler comes to Beck's defense:

My concern is very different. As an evangelical Christian, my concern is the primacy of the Gospel of Christ -- the Gospel that reveals the power of God in the salvation of sinners through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. The church's main message must be that Gospel. The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for governmental or social action. The apostles launched no social reform movement. Instead, they preached the Gospel of Christ and planted Gospel churches. Our task is to follow Christ's command and the example of the apostles.

The New Testament is stunningly silent on any plan for government or social action. Interesting response. Yes it is true that the New Testament writers don't have much to say about a government plan for social justice. Their government was the pagan Roman Empire and and in the eyes of the empire Christians were a new and suspicious religious movement. Government leaders did not recognize Christianity as legitimate; there was occasional government sanctioned persecution of Christians. The message of the NT writers was either lay low and don't make trouble or pray for the day when Jesus will return and punish the great whore Babylon. It is entirely unsurprising to find the NT silent on any plan for government social action.

What about the Old Testament, though. What about the prophets who railed against religious and political leaders for their injustice? They certainly had a vision for government social action on behalf of the poor and widows. Why isn't that pertinent to the discussion of whether Christians who now find themselves with a political voice and access to political power shouldn't use their voice and power to establish justice through government action? I am always confused about how some evangelical Christians pick and choose their moments to look to the Hebrew Bible for support.

And then there is Mohler's next sentence: The apostles launched no social reform movement. Read this passage from Acts:

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

This sounds a lot like a social reform movement to me. It sounds a lot like a socialist reform movement to me. It sounds like the kind of reform movement you would launch when there is no government sponsored social safety net and you are on your own. It also sounds like a template you might then transfer to the government when, lo and behold, you one day find yourself running it.

I think it is fair to say that early Christians felt a divine imperative to implement social justice reforms within their movement. I think if Rodney Stark is correct they not only did a good job of taking care of their own but they extended that care and hospitality to pagans and this helped win converts to the movement.

But I do not think it is fair to say that because the NT is silent on government-run social welfare programs that Christians should oppose them. There is a Christian social justice imperative rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and reinforced in the NT. There is an explicit reference to ends but not means. We ought to be open, then, to whatever is the most effective method of carrying out that imperative. The unparalleled success of Social Security of lifting the burden of poverty from seniors is but one example of social justice done well by the government, and done in a much more comprehensive way than any patchwork of church charities could ever do. Thanks to liberals, including liberal Christians. Thanks to liberals, including liberal Christians the same will soon be true of health care.

Al Mohler is wrong. Walter Rauschenbusch was right.

On Disbelieving Pastors

I said I was going to respond to this article.

For eight years out of seminary I served a Church of the Brethren congregation in northern Ohio. I still remember the Sunday after worship when a parishioner came up to me and told me that my recent sermons were "undermining the faith of our children." I don't remember what I was preaching on; but I distinctly remember the responses I was getting at the time.

Just out of seminary I spent the first half of my tenure at that church getting my pastoral legs under my feet. I spent the second half of my time there beginning to find my own faith. It was a messy process for me. Looking back on my time there it is not surprising to me that some people sitting in the pews must have been wondering why they were paying this pastor to raise question that might challenge their faith.

To be fair to me in many ways I was just tinkering around the edges, sharing a little bible scholarship about sources and sitz im leben and discrepencies in the Greek text of the NT, etc. My own biblical studies were being re-invigorated by the work of the Jesus Seminar, but I wasn't giving them full doses. And I wasn't sharing anything about my own deeper questions about Jesus and the reality of God.

To be fair to them they were a very traditional Brethren congregation. They were mostly pacifist and service oriented, the best of my tradition. They were also mostly union folks and liberal on economic issues, definitely a plus. But they held very traditional and moderately evangelical views on sin and salvation, the "purpose" of Jesus, and the authority of the Bible. And the issue of homosexuality was a "live" issue in that congregation but the subject was taboo. I didn't preach about it from the pulpit but I was talking about it a lot with individuals and families. From their perspective I am sure it felt like I was messing with their faith.

I began to realize during my last few years that I could not keep doing what I was doing. I couldn't say one thing from the pulpit - the safe thing, the traditional thing - and think something else. I couldn't not talk about some issues because it made some people uncomfortable. I couldn't lead the congregation in prayer to God when I wasn't sure there was anybody up there listening.

So I decided to resign. The fateful moment actually was brought about by a congregational vote to turn down an offer made by a local company to take a piece of the church's large property and build on it a child-care center paid for by that company who would also share the building with the church. It was in my view a huge no vote to mission and to the viability of the congregation. It was time for me to go.

At first I interviewed at several other churches. But in each case I realized that it wasn't going to work. They were asking me questions about biblical authority and the virgin birth and I wasn't going down that road again. So because of my wife's employment and education situation where we were in Ohio, I began to look for other work there.

When I got the call from a denominational representative to consider planting a church in the twin cities I initially said no. He said he was sending me the material anyway. So it came and I began to realize that this might be an opportunity for me to be a pastor and to be honest about my faith. If I started from the very beginning saying "this is what I believe" then those who came would know what they were getting into and those who stayed would stay because they appreciate this way of being a person of faith.

Seventeen years later I am still saying "this is what I believe" on Sunday mornings. Not "this is what the Bible says you should believe" or "this is what you must believe to be a Christian" or "this is what I believe" (but secretly I don't). I have found it to be a recipe for growing a thriving liberal Christian community where some non-Christians also find a spiritual home. I have also found it to be a recipe for sleeping well at night.

I sympathize with pastors who feel trapped because their own faith experience doesn't match the faith experience of the congregations they serve. I was there once. And I don't think there is one right response to being in this situation. Some pastors have the cross-cultural skills to make it work. They love the people they are with for who they are and have the vision and persistence to work at bringing people along little by little over time. (I realize this may sound patronizing and it is certainly true that growth happens in both ways. But I also make no apologies for saying that it is part of the pastor's job to "bring people along," i.e to grow; and bringing people along towards a more open and progressive vision is in my view a good thing.)

Other pastors don't have the temperament or the skill set. Or they simply have lost their faith. For them there is no sleeping well at night. I know some of them. For their own sake and for the sake of their congregations it would probably be better if they found a new career, or better yet started a new church where they could figure out their faith among like-minded people.

Disbelief in the Pulpit

Via James McGrath I want to call attention to this interesting discussion in the Washington Post based on this article: Preachers who are not Believers. I don't have time today but I plan on commenting on it soon.

Is It a Waste of Time if they don't Convert to Christianity?

Here is a question posted today at the Christianity Today blog:

If you aided someone for years and years and they never became a Christian, would you consider your efforts wasted?

The back story for this question is an AP report that appeared out of Haiti regarding tensions between evangelical Christians and practitioners of Voodoo. The story included these comments by Frank Amedia of Touch Heaven Ministries: “We would give food to the needy in the short term but if they refused to give up Voodoo, I'm not sure we would continue to support them in the long term because we wouldn't want to perpetuate that practice. We equate it with witchcraft, which is contrary to the Gospel.”

As it turns out the AP report took the comments of Mr. Amedia way out of context and he issued a clarification which you can read on the CT blog post. But he did say that eventually or "long term" as he says, his ministry might stop feeding them if they continued to practice Voodoo.

Hence we get the question from CT about whether our efforts would be "wasted" if we didn't get a conversion. This kind of question is a reminder to me of one of the many reasons I am not an evangelical Christian. I don't even understand the question. If I fed someone who lost everything in an earthquake and they didn't starve to death I would consider my mission accomplished. If I needed to keep feeding them for years in order to keep them from starving I would do it without question and not consider my efforts wasted regardless of whether they ever converted to my faith or not.

I am reminded of going to an evangelism training session many years ago put on by someone in our denomination. The topic was friendship evangelism and they showed a movie where Christians befriended their neighbors in order to get them to convert. Their motives weren't subtle; they - the actors playing Christians in the movie - talked about them in their table conversation as they plotted their strategy with their neighbors. Let's be friends with our neighbors so we can get them to convert. Let's have them over for dinner, go golfing with them, spend as much time as it takes to soften them up and when the moment is right pop the salvation question. I came home from the session feeling like I needed to take a shower.

I am not opposed to sharing my story when someone asks "why are you doing this.?" But the reason I am doing this - feeding the hungry, helping to rebuild homes after floods, sending money or Church World Service kits to Haiti, etc. - is because it is the right thing to do. It is what Christians do; it is what people of other faiths and no faiths do too. With no ulterior motives. I have been blessed. Out of the blessings I have experienced I want to help out others who are in need. It is that simple.

BTW it has been my experience that the AP is a really unreliable source for news, whether it is local, national or international.

It's Great to be One of the Chosen Ones

Amusing quote from my reading today:

As a general proposition, of course, it remains true that the majority of humankind is destined for damnation, and that the minority of the saved are very lucky; but in practice, we are confident that we belong in this minority; and that the universe is unfolding as it should. (From A Secular Age by Charles Taylor)

Taylor is talking about the unfolding Protestant reformation, especially the Calvinist variety, as it grew increasingly confident in its own ability to do the inner personal work of salvation and order society for the common good. So the next sentence after this quote is: "The declarations that we are helpless sinners become more and more pro forma."

But I am proof-texting here because the quote made me laugh. And... because lot's of Christians still believe it to be true that the vast majority of the world is going to hell but they are not.

It's Not All About Us

One of the bloggers I read is Drew Tatusko. Yesterday he had a post on the subject of original sin, raising the question of how Christian theology frames the doctrine of original sin when we no longer believe as the ancients did that sin was in some way biologically passed from generation to generation.

I am not much interested in arguing about original sin. What caught my attention was this part of Drew's post:

Time to get rid of total depravity and listen to the restoration movement and the teaching of John Cassian which offer a more elegantly simple and rational explanation for why we are so mean to each other sometimes and why animals have to survive by eating other animals and having lots of sex. Simply put, only God is perfect and so, the world and all that is in it was never perfect.

I am not familiar with the teaching of John Cassian. But I am interested in thinking about the question why if God is perfect the world is not perfect? Why if God is perfect, did this imperfect world happen? Why did God let it happen? I asked this question in comments on Drew's blog:

What I am missing here - and I am probably just dense - is how we get from a perfect God to an imperfect world? Not just fallen humanity, but earthquakes in Haiti. Did God just light the spark to start it all and then sit back and watch for humanity to get here billions of years later? Letting us evolve with the freedom to not be who we were created to be is somewhat troubling but workable. We at least have some choice in the matter. But what for God is the joy, point, purpose of being perfect and allowing or creating a universe to go on for billions of years that is so unpredictable and that involves so much suffering for all God's creatures.

Or is the perfect God just a metaphorical opposite of all the world is not?

There was no response to this question; the comments focused on the question of original sin, which was after all what Drew had posted about. The issue of original sin is important in Christian history and theology. Sometimes when I read these discussions, though, I think back to having toddlers in the house and those moments when they act and think as if they are the center of the universe even though they have only been on the planet for two years.

The earth is 4.5 billion years old. The first reptiles appeared 300 million years ago; mammals 75 million years ago; apes 35 million years ago and apelike humans 10 million years ago; homo sapiens a mere 200,000 years ago. Sometime in what seems like our distant past modern humans became aware of our mortality, our propensity to do harm to ourselves and others, and the idea that there might be a God up there who made us. And we began to wonder why God made us this way and whether we did something wrong somewhere along the way to screw things up.

But long before we were here - and I mean long in the sense that if you are thinking of the passing of a 24 hour day and at one minute before midnight we showed up thinking of ourselves as if the world revolves around us - there were plants and animals and there has been one very long history of life and death and suffering in our world. That predates us and our johny-come-lately worries by millions of years. Why? If God is perfect and God created it all, why?

By focusing on the question of original sin and what part we might play in our own suffering, I think we too easily let God off the hook. God gave us a choice and we made a mess of things, and so in some cosmic scheme of justice it makes sense that we are getting what we deserve. Or so the thinking goes. Even this idea is problematic but at least we can understand the kind of thinking that suggests that our suffering is somehow the result of our own bad choices. It is not God's fault; it is ours. God doesn't want to punish us, but has to be fair. It is for our own good, but God really loves us. That is why he sent us Jesus. And so it goes on and on and it is all about us.

What about the suffering of animals? What about that lamb that experiences a moment of fear and then intense pain when the lion bites into its neck? Did the lamb do something to deserve this fate? Why must it suffer? Where is God in this suffering?

To me this is a much more profound line of questioning to pose to and about God than why we humans are so nasty to each other. Why would a perfect God create a world where for millions of years on end all God's creatures endure pain and suffering? What is the joy in that? Is it really all for the glory of God?

In any case, it's not all about us.

The Anchors of our Faith

James McGrath links to an interesting post by Ricky Carvel where Mr. Carvel talks about his struggle to reconcile his faith in God with his growing skepticism about whether the Bible actually "describes" that God. This prompts Jim to reflect on his own "life-transforming" experience of God that was more important in his faith formation than his belief in the Bible. This experiential "anchor" freed him to do critical study of the Bible and that critical study did not lead to the loss of faith. He wonders if those who resist critical study of the Bible do so because the Bible as the revelation of God is their anchor, more so than experience. Interesting question.

I never believed in the Bible as "the Word" of God. I was a sceptic about miracle stories and resurrections from the dead from childhood on. I also never had any kind of "saving relationship with Jesus Christ." In fact the two worst experiences of Christianity that I ever had growing up were going to a Billy Graham movie with a youth group and participating (by virtue of being in church on those Sundays) in a Lay Witness Renewal where the goal was to bring us to a saving relationship with Jesus and where I felt totally manipulated.

What "saved" me in church was the community made up of caring Sunday School teachers and youth group leaders and just lots of good people. With a very few exceptions I enjoyed church and was encouraged by pastors and other leaders who took an interest in me to raise the questions I was raising, and who embodied the way of Jesus in the way they lived their lives.

My "God" experiences growing up were mystical experiences in nature, in reading and thinking, and in relationships that I didn't think of as God experiences because I wasn't given the language to connect my experiences with God. They certainly were nothing like the God I heard talked about in church or read about in the Bible. It wasn't until I began reading about mystics and I learned that there was such a thing as an apophatic tradition within Christianity that I realized that my own spiritual experiences had a place in the big tent of historic Christianity. That helped keep my in the fold, so to speak, and eventually gave me a passion for reaching out to others who might have the same kind of non-traditional experiences.

What also helped was doing critical study of the Bible which had the seemingly curious effect of strengthening my faith. I learned that there wasn't just one understanding of God or one picture of Jesus in the Bible. The Bible itself was full of diversity and not only diversity but disagreement about Jesus and God and Truth. Furthermore the various authors weren't just channeling God or singing in harmony but were vigorously arguing a position with their contemporaries, and correcting the positions of those who came before. Learning a little church history and discovering the non-canonical gospels only confirmed this truth for me. There was never a golden age of unified belief and there has never been one correct picture of God, Jesus, or the Truth. Learning to read the Bible as an ongoing conversation or argument helped me re-engage the Bible as a beginning place for reflection about my faith.

Anyway, for me it wasn't believing in the Bible or having a life-transforming Jesus experience (language not used by Jim) that kept me within the fold of Christianity. It was community - not perfect community, but real community made up of imperfect but good-hearted people, which in its own way was a life-transforming anchor.

Leadership Conversations

Sometimes it takes 15 years to get it right.

We have never done much in the way of formal leadership training at Open Circle. We are a relatively small congregation and our structure has been pretty fluid through the years. Leaders have just stepped up and into many positions; for certain positions we have a congregational call process where we ask the congregation to identify the people who best represent the values of our community. Mostly we have been blessed with hard-working, gifted people who have stepped up to get the work done. But not too long ago we had a bad "match" that ended badly and we realized that it would be helpful to have a structure in place to have intentional conversations about leadership with current and prospective leaders in order to get to know prospective leaders and to better match gifts with needs.

Two books we found very helpful in this regard are Bruce Sanguin's The Emerging Church and Anna Christie's Evoking Change. Both talk about the importance of paying attention to the emotional and spiritual health of leaders and both have suggestions for how to better equip leaders.

So we are 5 weeks into a 7 week session on the spiritual and emotional foundations of leadership. It has been a great experience with the group we have. Each week we begin with a meditation; each meditation is led by a member of the group. That person is also responsible that week to share something of their creativity. We have had baking, crafts, writing and journaling thus far. Then there is the information part that includes: spiritual practice, meta-narratives of scripture, faith sharing, self-definition, boundaries, and staying connected across differences. We will close with a session on group dynamics. We have had great conversations about our roles as leaders at church, in families, at work. The benefit of this kind of gathering for getting to know leaders, learning from each other, and better matching gifts with needs is readily apparent.

Two weeks ago we had a very interesting session on faith sharing. Faith sharing is something we don't do much of in progressive churches. We know what we don't believe, and many of us are fairly uncomfortable in settings where people are sharing their faith. But it seems fairly important for leaders in a progressive church to have moved beyond "I don't believe this anymore" to be able to comfortably talk about what they do believe. So the group had a week to do their homework and everyone came with a written statement of faith. None of them sounded anything like the Nicene Creek - Thank God! We are learning something here - but each was well-thought out and articulated a positive statement of that person's faith. It was a great exercise.

It's never to late to learn from your mistakes and change the way you do things.

Everyday Miracles

My newsletter article this week:

I don't often make note of the feast days of Catholic Saints, but September 25 was the feast day of Saint Finbar, an Irish monk who lived as a hermit on a small island at Lough Eiroe, off southern Ireland. According to Catholic tradition, many miracles were attributed to St. Finbar upon his death in 633, among them the sun not setting for two weeks. Finbar's hermitage locale remains a pilgrimage destination to this day.

Finbar's own Christianity, though, was apparently rooted as much in local druidic tradition as Catholic teaching, and was likely grounded not in supernatural miracle but in the everyday miracles of the natural world: "the early Irish texts suggest a God who is immanent in every part of creation -- in Sun, Moon, stars, wind and wave -- indeed , inseparable from the creation, even as the unutterable mystery of the universe confounds our understanding and perception."

I have recently been re-reading Elaine Pagels' book Beyond Belief. Pagels is one of several scholars who think that the Gospel of John was written in conversation with the Gospel of Thomas, or perhaps to correct and combat the teachings of the community of Thomas. Whether Pagels is right about this is a matter of much dispute among scholars and is as we are fond of saying these days "above my pay grade" to know.

What is indisputable, though, is that the message of the Gospel of John that Jesus is God, and that Jesus came to save us, and that we are in need of salvation, and that this salvation is not possible apart from believing in Jesus became the orthodox position within Christianity and was eventually incorporated into the creeds and remains an essential element of Christian teaching to this day. Pagel's book tells the story of how this came to be.

The notion that God is within us, that we don't need salvation so much as illumination, as taught by the Jesus found in the Gospel of Thomas, isn't orthodox. The orthodox position holds that we can't save ourselves or help ourselves because all vestiges of the immanence of God within us were obliterated by original sin and now we need divine help from the outside.

I don't agree with this for a moment. Neither did Finbar, and neither did a host of Christian mystics who would follow through the centuries and keep alive within Christianity the notion that the divine spark is present in each of us and in every tree, flower, wisp of wind, and ray of the sun.

We don't need Jesus to save us. We do need to be reminded from time to time, though, that the divine spark is there within us and around us. If we listen. If we are attentive. What we can learn from Jesus is that there is a way of living that puts us in touch with the God within and around us.

For many Christians, of course, it is the miracles of Jesus and the miracle of his resurrection that make the difference, just as it was the miracles attributed to Finbar that made him worthy of being a Catholic saint. But I will settle for the everyday miracles of friends and community and the beauty that is everywhere we look, if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

Evolving Values Systems

Several months ago the leadership team at our church read The Emerging Church by Bruce Sanguin. Sanguin is pastor at Canadian Memorial Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Emerging Church (not to be confused with the emergent Christian movement), is a reflection and manual about congregational leadership development from a progressive Christian perspective. I highly recommend it, as well as another book that Sanguin draws on heavily, Evoking Change by Anna Christie. Christie is a pastor and therapist and has written a great book about how to grow our emotional health and intelligence, and about how important this is in the church. I wish I had read these books years ago.

In any case, tucked in the middle of Sangin's book is a brief discussion about Spiral Dynamics. Spiral Dynamics was pioneered by the late Dr. Clare Graves, a developmental psychologist, who mapped out a historical time-line of the evolution of worldviews and value systems. Don Beck, a student of Graves, color-coded the map and made it easier for the lay person to understand. According to Graves, for the first humans basic survival was all that mattered. For much of human history they existed at the Arhaic/Survivalist Value System (Beige). Then about 50,000 years ago clans and tribes formed and the Tribal Value System (Purple) replaced basic survival as the over-riding value. The gods existed to protect and help the clan; magic could be used to invoke the Gods. Purple was followed by Red, the Warrior Values System (10,000 yrs ago), the Blue, the Traditional Values System (5,000 yrs ago), Orange, the Modernist Value System (300 yrs ago), Green, the Postmodernist Value System (150 years ago); in the last 3 decades two further values systems have begun to emerge: Yellow, the Integral Values System, and finally Turquoise, the Mystical Values System. You can read much more about Spiral Dynamics here.

Sanguin used Spiral Dynamics to make two points. One, to buttress his case that spirituality is evolving; there is clear historical evidence that we are progressing spiritually. Two, to make the point that individuals and congregations have different colors, or worldviews and value systems. This is important to remember, he says, because although two people may be reading the same scripture text, they are reading it through the eyes of their dominant color or values system. And if they are in different colors they are understanding the text in very different ways. Further, according to Sanguin and Spiral Dynamics, there is no way in the world that a person at a lower rung or spiral can understand it at a higher level. They can evolve over time - that's the good news - but until they do they can't understand a person or congregation who is reading or operating at a higher level of the spiral.

At first blush the whole notion of Spiral Dynamics rubs me the wrong way. It sounds and feels very elitist to me. It also meshes well with a post-modern perspective on the world which also often rubs me the wrong way because it is so frequently used to deny the existence of any truth whatsoever, or to simply dismiss the need for conversation. What is the point of talking if we each have our own truth and we can't really hope to understand each other?

But I have had the experience of sitting with people who have heard my messages and then listened as they tell me what they just heard, and thought to myself, "We are not living in the same world." Sanquin and Spiral Dynamics would say that we are living out of different colors. There is a certain sense in which this does feel elitist, particularly if I presume that they are understanding at a lower level than me. And would I, I wonder, know it if I was the one who was at the lower level? I think not.

I would like to believe, as well, that we are evolving spiritually. I don't think human nature changes but I hope that human values are evolving towards a higher plane. I think the evidence supports this view; after-all there is no one in the western world today who sanctions slavery. No one can deny, I think, that we still have the capacity to do great evil, and our progress has given us the technology to inflict irreparable harm on the earth and its inhabitants, but I think our sights have been raised in terms of what it means to be human and a member of spaceship Earth.

This whole concept does raise an interesting question of whether someone like the Buddha or Jesus was able to transcend the highest values system of their day? Were they just the most enlightened individuals within their day, but still bound by the limits of their (Blue) worldview? Or were they already seeing and living at the highest (Turquoise) level. My guess is that with Spiral Dynamics the answer would be that they were bound by the worldview of their day. I would tend to agree. I just don't think it is very helpful to blame Jesus or Buddha, or Paul, for not knowing everything and getting everything right. It is enough for me to let them be truly inspired visionaries for their day and admit that they were wrong about some things, from the perspective of our more evolved worldview.