Jesus as a great teacher and bringing in God's kingdom on one's own terms

An excerpt derived from U. of Kentucky professor Erik Reece's new book, An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God, as published in the Washington Post and re-published in the C-J...

God may have struck down Paul of Taursus on the road to Damascus and turned him into the world's first Christian.

An inauspicious opening to an article I would still encourage you to read-- but perhaps indicative of Reece's background and perspective. Paul was the first Christian? Huh?

But unlike the "conversion experience," I have found that losing faith is not a cataclysmic event. It's more like watching mist rise off a river in the morning. You can't say exactly when it disappeared, but you know it is gone for good.

There are examples of both conversion and deconversion "experiences"-- and there are examples of mist-like entering and exiting of faith (of various types).

My father and grandfather were Baptist preachers. I spent the first 18 years of my life in the compulsory service of the church, and the next 18 years trying to extract myself from its long tentacles. After that, I spent a few more years writing a book about losing faith, and searching for something to replace it...

Baptist? That may explain something! ;-) Depends on what sort of Baptist, I suppose-- the caricature, the stereotype, or from among a wide range of good people.

Why is he looking to replace his faith with something (else)?

The basic premise of An American Gospel is that the kingdom of God lies all around us, not waiting in the sweet hereafter. Therefore, we must conduct our lives in ways that honor -- and will make more manifest -- this immanent kingdom through stewardship, empathy and a very real sense of the just.

Now, we're talking! This is a key thought, made most clear to me in the writings of Dallas Willard (especially in The Divine Conspiracy). Putting it succinctly, at least for the Christian: eternal life has already begun.

As Willard notes, many religious conservatives reduce faith, grace, and the Christian life to a "bar-code faith"-- where one has the correct doctrinal beliefs and gets scanned into Heaven. Among religious liberals, it is common to reduce Jesus Christ to a "great teacher"-- but unfortunately, many of whose teachings they don't believe!

Reece may be a product of the former path and now takes the latter path. See how he notes Willard's concern with conservatives but then falls into the other effort illustrated by Willard:

"But you still believe in the resurrection don't you?" [my mom] asked. An uncomfortable silence followed. How was I to put this? I could have taken the route of many New Testament scholars and said that I believe in the symbolism of the resurrection. But that wouldn't have satisfied her anymore than it does most Christians....

The fact is, American Christianity has historically been focused so obsessively on the Nicene Creed -- which says Jesus was the son of God, who was crucified for our sins and rose from the grave three days later -- that it never made much room for the actual teachings of this radical Jewish street preacher.

This next part is bizarre. He's absolutely correct in the last sentence of this paragraph. But otherwise, he's confusing Good Friday with Easter or insisting on a narrow interpretation of Easter.

This is why I'm against Easter. It celebrates the death of Jesus nearly to the exclusion of his life. If the Easter miracle can save us from this life, then why bother with the harder work of enacting the kingdom of God here? It is, after all, much harder....

Then, to the punchline: it's the teachings of Jesus. We're left to guess which teachings Reece will support. If he follows the norm, he'll assume god-like powers and decide which ones are legitimate-- i.e., which fit what he wants to believe.

I'm left with the teachings of Jesus -- words so radical, they got him killed, words so radical, they might still bring about the end of empire and the beginning of the kingdom of God.