Rescue Philosophy's Impact to Culture

From 8/31/2016

We need to move away from an apocalyptic mindset, one of Rescue Philosophy or Rescue Theology.

What I believe is that Jesus Christ was a teacher and prophet that walked this earth. I will consider the possibility that he was immaculately conceived by the holy spirit, or God, in the young Virgin Mary. I have no problem with this part of the Jesus story. I also believe that he was a healer, and did things most could not do, miracles. I believe the narrative of the gospels in that Jesus was persecuted and eventually executed. I even think that he was resurrected (at least in some fashion), and eventually ascended to the heavenly realm. What I do not believe is that Jesus is God meaning God the Father, the God that Jesus prayed to. I believe the invention that Jesus and God are one in the same is an invention of the later church as it struggled to remain monotheistic. There is plenty of history to review here, but I don't want to go into that. (See Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the Arian Controversy among other references, not to mention the Gnostics). I believe it is more like the gospels tell it, Jesus is seated at the right hand of God. Subordinate and separate. This is the first half of my heresy.

The second half is that I do not believe in an apocalypse where, all souls are judged and all flesh is made new, or that God will first destroy everything (just to prove he can) then make everything new again. I don't believe that Jesus is coming again. He might, I could be wrong, and am willing to accept that. I am willing to accept I am wrong when new evidence is presented, and review my stance on something in light of new information. At the end of the day, with regard to such matters, we have only what we believe. We cannot prove God's existence nor God's plan as we could perhaps prove a scientific theory, though I think He has left us many road signs. All we have in such matters is what we believe, and that is what faith is all about.

This apocalyptic way of thinking has resulted in a society that procrastinates or simply absolves itself of the responsibility to future generations and neglects the present. The thought that someday God is going to swoop down from heaven and make all things right again, well if we believe that, and especially if we believe that it is going to happen sooner than later then we may fall into the delusion that we have no responsibility of taking care of our good earth, nor mending the vast divides that we've wedged between class, culture, religion, race, and gender (to name a few). God will save us from ourselves… right? What if we're wrong about that? What if God tweeted to the whole world, "Sorry humans, you're on your own."

What then would that mean to us? We'd be forced to start thinking in terms that break with the conventions created by apocalyptic propheteering. Perhaps we'd start thinking, "wow, we should probably get our crap together, start taking care of this planet. No one else is going to fix it. We might ought to think about what we're going to do when the oil runs out, or consider the point of the wars we wage… (there really truly is no point to them). We need to mend these rifts, these divides we've created between peoples, or else 'The End' will be our own doing".

At least I hope that we start thinking differently. It is funny to me that the disastrous end we imagine may become a reality, only it will be wrought by our own hands. Not God's. However, if we change our mindset about these things and realize that if we do not fix things then no one else will, then we might actually bring about the other part of the prophecy, the one where there are no more wars, and the Earth is healthy.

That is the revelation.

Jesus was the example of what that behavior looks like (among other things). God sent us many more, Buddha, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just to name a few.

So I would plead with the world to start living by Christ's example, not the Creeds created around the beginning and end of his life. The Creeds leave out that middle part, the gospels, the good news. Each gospel tells its own story of how Jesus lived, taught, and interacted with people. The Mark's Gospel does not mention Jesus's birth nor does it go into any detail about what happened after his resurrection (there are a couple alternate endings of Mark that most biblical scholars agree was added by different authors, not Mark). My point is that not much of what was in Mark made it into the Creeds, so what is important about Mark's Gospel? It like the other Gospels gives us the answer on how to live as a people that have ceased killing each other, focusing on differences, greedily consuming (everything), and trashing our house, the Earth, God's house.

So wake up, make your bed, clean your room, tidy the house, get up and go! Go out there and act like spiritual adults, stop acting like infants, mommy and daddy aren't going to come fix your boo-boo's. Jesus is not coming (or we need to start acting like it), he was here already and gave us the keys, we just need to realize that the door is there waiting for us to open it.