The Religion OF Jesus - not ABOUT Jesus: Toward the theology OF Jesus

This article is the first in a series of articles offering an alternative to the existing "traditional" Christian liturgical and protestant theology based on the worship of a monarchical version of Jesus and of God as Father.

Of an acceptance of the Bible as an inerrant absolute by Jesus there is no evidence, except by self-serving historical inference on the part of early Catholic fathers and later Protestant reformers who had been culturally programmed to accept the idea of an inerrant and absolute Bible. Such an idea reduces scripture to that of mere divine legislation - simultaneously obscuring the mystical relationship with God that is found there.

Yet with a conscious intent to resist the cultural programming to see the Bible only as authoritarian, the words of Jesus seem to leap off the page in an epiphany of understanding that perhaps He was not the Incarnation of a divine and precisely defined autocrat, but the Incarnation of something much more.

A gospel of monarchical laws, ordinances and obedience was not Jesus' good news. Jesus' good news was His, and our, innately mortal theology. It is a theology of relationship rather than worship, edified and communicated by ordinances and ritual which formed the basis of symbolism leading to a mystical, epiphanic and on-going relationship with the God of experience.

A mystical God of compassion is as much our right to encounter as we are impelled by tradition and dogma to attempt a fearful relationship with an autocrat who has been always been more imprecisely defined than precisely portrayed.

To see what Jesus saw, to feel what Jesus felt, and to know what Jesus knew is far more precise than to try to extrapolate in our own lives, the conformity-ridden chestnut of "what would Jesus do?"

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