AN EXAMINATION OF ALTERNATIVE CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITIES, PAST AND PRESENT

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Jesus the Enlightened Teacher vs Jesus the Superstar

If Jesus had not preached the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plain, if he had never shown kindness and mercy and human forgiveness to social outcasts, if all he had done was perform magical acts (i.e., supernatural miracles), been crucified, and risen from the dead, would he still be worthy of veneration? Many people believe that his miracles are proof of his Godhood, and are enough in and of themselves to worship him as the Son of God. However, what if his miracles were merely an emanation of his simple innate goodness of spirit? If we want to be true Christians, we cannot separate the moral teaching from the wonder of the magical power. If we only contemplate Jesus as a wonderworker, we may as well worship magic, than to make any pretense of valuing the moral attitudes Jesus taught us to develop toward our fellow human beings. What if Jesus had never walked on water, never fed the 5000 from a single basket of food, never raised Lazarus from the dead, and not resurrected himself after his crucifixion? To my mind, he would still be worth venerating (and aspiring to) as one of the greatest prophets (in the old sense of that word) to emerge from Jewish society. Today, many over-emphasize his god-like powers, and in doing so, they seem to miss the point. What if the main point is what Jesus tried to teach human beings about themselves?

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