Christianity for the Next 1000 Years: 95 Theses

In the beginning, God created skies and earth.

           Welcome.  I pray you are well as you read my words today. 

           I wrote these 95 Theses as quickly as I could and for fun.  They emerge from a lifetime of living as a God person.  They express who I am today.  

          I could write 95 more, for God has blessed me with a mind that finds God in every particle of being.  I see an onion, a sea shell, a power cord, a ladder, dice, a planet, a crater, a kiss, test tubes, a church, novels, a synagogue, a cathedral, fried chicken, a mosque, a pebble, a  railroad track, a polynomial, a thought, a grand slam (Braves fan), a fine defensive stop (Go Falcons), a brownie with nuts topped with chocolate almond ice cream, poems, wine, a father or mother returning from war, a man or woman standing near an interstate entrance holding a sign that says, “I am hungry,” a child, children, my children, my wife, my family, and there I find God.

73.   In the ancient world BC (Before Copernicus) the gods impregnated human women.  Dead people lived again.  Chariots could ride across the sky.  But these things only happened to immortals and men who became immortal.

74.  To ancient people, the problem with Jesus had nothing to do with the supernatural.  The problem was that this man Jesus was supernatural.  He was not Caesar.  He was a nobody Jew, a condemned criminal, an obscure country preacher from Jerkwater, Israel who went to the big city and got squashed. 

75.  Today, the supernatural is a problem for me.  Maybe magic can happen, but it really never happens. I look at the present and the past with scientific eyes and historical eyes grounded in scientific methods.  I cannot help but do this.  It is very likely Jesus was arrested after disturbing the peace during Passover and immediately taken away to be crucified because Roman guards would not have bothered with a lowlife Jew disturbing the peace in the Temple during a volatile religious holiday.

76.  His disciples fled.  They did not want to be arrested.  They did not see where Jesus was crucified.  The Romans could have crucified him anywhere.  If that is true then his body was left to rot. The early Christians in whom Jesus lived told other stories about Jesus' death.

77.  To those who loved him and those who love him today, he is alive still.  The early Christians expressed his ongoing life with stories, not facts, and we do so today.

78.  With no eye witnesses upon which to base a narrative, the gospel writer whom tradition calls Mark went to the Jewish Bible in search of passages about a man of God who suffered.  He did not have to look very hard.  As one Bible scholar has said, “It was a job description.”  The writer called Mark took words from those passages and crafted his narrative.  His narrative became the primary source for other narratives about Jesus, his life, and his death.

79.  Before Mark wrote his gospel, there were sayings attributed to Jesus and stories about him that were told among the earliest believers.  His disciples kept him alive.  His disciples today keep him alive.

80.  Matthew and Luke are expanded editions of Mark; plus they share another common source of Jesus sayings that is not found in Mark.  The latter source was discovered by German scholars in the 19^th century.  They called it Quelle or the Q source.  When the Gospel of Thomas was discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, it lent credence to the idea that early Christians collected Jesus sayings and preserved them in texts.

81.  The gospel that tradition ascribes to John was written much later than the synoptic gospels.  In it, Jesus is more supernatural and more mystical.  John is scripture that is a different Jesus tradition than the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

82.  The gospels are not eyewitness accounts.  They are redactions, that is, parts of other texts put together in order to tell the good news about Jesus.  All the gospels are anonymous.  No one really knows who wrote them. 

83.  To Christians, Jesus is God’s Word.  Scripture is a written word of God. The gospels are inspired, but they are not the same Word that Jesus is in the sense that they are the final revelation of God.  Scripture points to Jesus.  Scripture is not Jesus.

84.  Jesus told stories about God.  Early Christians told stories about Jesus.  He has been vindicated by his resurrection.  He lives in his church.  Even today, we continue to tell stories about Jesus.

Thanks for visiting today.  I hope to see you here again tonight.  I appreciate any input you might offer.  Blessings…