Introduction to A Future Kindle Book (Rough Draft)
Working title “JESUS RE-GRASPED)
Subtitle: “A Radical Reclaiming of Jesus as the Exponent of Heaven”
For two centuries Jesus has been hammered in three major ways.
There was first higher criticism which led to a range of responses with Schweitzer calling Jesus unknowable on one end and the most demonic sorts of fundamentalism on the other. The middle was a spectrum from tentative belief to evangelical fervor. His cause was not helped.
Second came the fallout from this scholarship and reaction to it. There was a distinct decline in the mainline segments of the church and a predictable rise in what might be called false piety — whether the US spectacle of Trump being followed by GOP Evangelicals or Ugandan Christians engaging in equally depressing displays of nativism.
Thirdly, this book contends that Jesus has essentially escaped the confines of the institutional church if he was ever there at all. It presents Jesus in terms of the assumption that the near-death experience veterans and paranormal observers are correct. He is neither the special-knowledge maestro of Gnostic understandings nor the exemplar of earthly social gospel expressions of the Walter Rauschenbush, Harry Emerson Fosdick schools of thought.
The third perspective is that Jesus is like all expressions we perceive of heaven. He is part of a general light, presence, or force beyond our capacity to describe or even understand.
When Jesus taught, heaven was constantly on his lips. But he is no different than the other earthly Avatars of spirituality. All of them represent an understanding that is to so simple and direct that the only thing required is universal understanding of its truth. We are infinitely and unconditionally loved. We can do nothing that will ever separate us from this love. Heaven is our destiny.
Consciousness has to do with this. So in at least some minds does science, particularly the later signs rising from quantum field studies. We are hardly to the end of physics. But we are at the same time capable of arriving at satisfactory proofs based on burgeoning research.
This book will go through the accepted body of Jesus teachings and approach them from the universal perspective that sees us as all destined to continue life in the realm Jesus called heaven. It will comment on this in relation to perceptions of Christianity that seem to me destined to decline as Jesus is seen to be essentially the one that he is taken to be by those who claim contemporary access to him. This perception is far enough removed from the church institution to be enunciated by persons who themselves no longer see themselves as strictly Christian.
(in progress)
