Relearning Jesus

What I am about to say will sound entirely illogical, but one of the best things Christians can do for themselves and for others is to start over again and relearn Jesus. It stands to reason that modern experience and knowledge has greatly toppled over traditional facts about religion and morality that were always assumed to be truisms. It no longer makes sense to say that God is partial only to one particular race of people; most concepts of "sinfulness" seem unnecessary or silly by modern standards; and the historical evidence of an authentic human Jesus is scant. If anything, the primary evidence of Jesus's very existence, the Bible, is riddled with allusions to and borrowings from many other religions and practices that hail from the ancient Mediterranean. To say Christianity is unique is downright preposterous given what we know about these historical ties to previous rituals, myths, and philosophies.

Knowing this, the modern Christian has to finally rid themselves of blind, ignorant faith and accept the fact that almost 2,000 years of Christian apologetics is practically defunct in the present era. Reading material like Thomas Aquinas's mind boggling Summa Theologica no longer convinces us of God's existence with the same force it did for medieval thinkers. In a culture where we demand physical evidence of all things there is no overwhelming proof even for the existence of God's very Incarnation - something that should have left a very real physical imprint on the archaeological record.

It becomes clear that all may not be what it seems regarding the mythology of Christianity. In order to remain sensible beings we must at least quietly entertain the possibility that Christ never existed in the first place, which seemingly throws the entire religion into chaos and sets it on a path toward destruction. But this is not necessarily true.

In my personal approach to faith, I have tried to remain connected to its historical source. I have always wanted to know how early and medieval Christians experienced our shared religion. There is so much one can learn from the texts and documents from these periods, and I consider it a tremendous tragedy that many moderns neglect this aspect of Christianity's rich narrative, yet they still claim to know much about their religion. But the most crucial aspect of what I've learned from this kind of study is that allegory is everything. The traditional historical Christian mystic has no patience for the things of the temporal or material. For them everything in the Bible is primarily transcendental, and things that occur in the physical domain are simply illusive reflections of an allegorical reality original conceived in the spiritual realm. In other words, the events of every day life conceal messages and influences from various other powers. The same is true of all narratives and parables, and we know that Jesus speaks primarily in parables throughout the Bible.

The truth is, the narrative of Jesus's life does not have to have literally happened in order to be deeply relevant in the real world. Truly the Bible is considered to be the direct Word of God, and this has particular connotations. We can recall from the Gospel of St. John that, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God." John is referring to Christ, as the Christ is understood to be the Living Word, or the Word Made Flesh. Philo the Jew (20 B.C.  - 50 A.D.), one of the most influential Neo-Platonic philosophers of the entire period of Antiquity and perhaps the originator of the whole "Logos" concept in the first place, explained that the Logos or Word of God was the person through whom God crafted the Universe. Since God cannot directly come into contact with matter (as in the Platonic approach matter is strictly evil due to its density), He requires an intermediary in order to shape and affect it as according to His Will. (Of course, Word and Will are inextricably synonymous.) The Logos is therefore equivalent to God's "blueprint" for Creation, a kind of ideal design for the world as it should be. Matter being weak, heavy, and mutable is unable to sustain this level of perfection and therefore it allows for evil to exist. In other words, to patch these two points together, Christ has existed since the beginning of time prior to the creation of matter and is also the equivalent to the Bible itself. In this light, then, the Bible represents the "blueprint" for the ideal universe, not necessarily the real universe.

Therefore to say that the Bible depicts literal events as they occur in matter, in extension through space and time, is to miss the point. Theoretically the narrative of the Bible occurs simultaneously, not in extension. We can benefit from conceptualizing the timeline of Jesus's life as conflated with the timeline of the Jewish people as told in the Old Testament. And even more specific events within the two timelines can occur simultaneously, or be understood to be directly connected. The Annunciation takes place at the same time as the Visitation, the Presentation, and the Assumption. The Nativity of Christ occurs simultaneously with His Passion and Resurrection. The Exile of the Jewish people is in synch with the slaying of Goliath, etc.

Obviously this opens a difficult Pandora's Box, if you will. The Bible no longer seems to make sense. And yet, we must at least attempt to see how this is possible if only by recognizing that God is eternally present. God is an never-ending NOW, an eternal circle of all possible pasts, presents, and futures condensed into one pure Moment. To us, the Moment appears to happen in a linear or even cyclical fashion. The events of Christ's life are commemorated throughout the solar year; in doing so we achieve linear comprehension of the narrative as well as cyclical as the years endlessly repeat themselves. But in the eye of God all these events relate to one eternal present that never changes or fades, one that constitues what is supposedly God's ideal "blueprint" for the world.

As if this weren't confusing enough, what do we do when we remember that Christianity teaches us that Christ lives in each of us? That Christ is the literal center of our unique and individual lives, and that therefore we are all unified in some subtle and unexplainable way? This is to say that each individual contains at the center of their lives the same narrative structure as the entire contents of the Bible as told from the Creation of the World in Genesis to its Destruction by Fire in Apocalypse. But we all know instinctively that we don't all lead the exact same lives - the specific contexts of our individual lives pan out differently for each of us. And yet it is undeniably an aspect of Christian teaching that Christ, the Omniscient Logos, resides in each of our hearts. This is to say that over the course of one's life one experiences the same story as that told in the Life of Christ, since He, the universal blueprint, constitutes the center around which each of our lives revolves. The exact details of the way in which this story unfolds for each of us is different. The narrative is the same. This is only possible because the narrative itself does not actually occur within the confines of space and time. The narrative of Jesus Christ is an ideal allegorical representation of what it is to be human, to have the spirit wedded to the tabernacle of the body, for whom the spirit seems to suffer and undergo death out of love.

This further suggests that the Logos is not only the means by which a transcendant God manipulates the universe from afar, but is the tool or hand by which God directly interacts and lives in the world. Through the dense material of the body God's narrative plays out in space and time in an endless circle in as many different forms as He sees fit. No matter what corruption ever befalls the Son through death the original Godhead remains pure and unadulterated. The Source of Life is never tainted no matter what grossness may affect Him through interaction with matter. Knowing this we can affirm that in Christ we are One Body and One Blood; that we are all spotless at heart, and no torment may ever change or affect who we really are; and that God so loved the world that he sent His only Begotten One to redeem it from darkness. Matter in and of itself is useless. It is only through invigoration through the spirit of life that it becomes something of value. But the selfless contribution of Life to matter in order to endow that matter with Consciousness inevitably condemns that Life energy to die and seemingly change. But after the Passion Christ rises again and remains untainted. In dying Christ opens the gates of paradise; in opting for death the spirit blows open the doors of the earthly hell and brings down the fires of the ideal paradise. In Christ we know there is no east nor west, and in Christ we may therefore also say that Heaven and Hell are allowed to coexist to some extent. In Him and through His Death the great possibilities of the ideal world as represented by the Logos are allowed to be brought forth into the darkness of the material world.