Post 9/11 there seems a growing consensus that religion is one of the world's most dangerous commodities. Religion, as Sister Joan Chittister points out, has become religion's worst enemy¹. And of course we know there is only one thing more dangerous than religion and that's passionately held religion. Blaise Pascale has reminded us that 'men never do evil so completely as when they do it from religious conviction.'

On the level of functionality, in a world where most people seem to want to live securely, peacefully, happily and with a sustainable future for their children, we have to admit that religion, as we are doing it at the moment, is not working very well. Far from creating peace and stability, religion all too often divides, distorts and becomes part of today's global problems rather than contributing to a solution. Not wanting to overstate this but global analysts seem to be saying that on the whole monotheistic or Abrahamic religions have simply compounded the problem of conflict, racial and ethnic hatred and have brought the world to the brink of disaster.

Firstly, I believe, it is imperative that we, as custodians of one particular faith tradition, carry out a quality check on our product. Does that which we market on a regular week by week basis still have the quality and efficacy of the original design or is it, at least some of it, passed its sell by date? Is our current model contributing to the well being of the planet?

Secondly it is my conviction that we 'behave as we believe.' When we look at religion in the world and see a version of the English TV programme 'Men Behaving Badly' we must ask the question - what is it about our belief, and particularly our beliefs about God, that allow us to behave in such ways?

I suppose for most of my life I've lived with the dissatisfaction of the traditional rendering of Christianity. It's as if as a musician I hear a hymn tune and know that that tune just doesn't work - it doesn't do justice to the words or the message, its melody doesn't go anywhere and seldom does it raise people to new heights of spiritual experience. But the haunting question - can I write an alternative tune?

Early in my ministry I came to the conclusion that exclusivist religion and elitist separatist theology did not serve humankind very well. In 1963 John Robison, Bishop of Woolwich and then Dean of Trinity somehow assured me with his book Honest to God² that it was OK to go on asking the questions and to push the envelope as they say. I travelled to the East and pursued teachers who took me beyond my tradition. Whether it was with Don Cupitt in Cambridge, Jean Vanier in France, Murray Rogers in Jerusalem or Fr Bede Griffiths in South India, something kept challenging me to always go for what Richard Rohr calls the Big God. 'God,' I remember him saying 'is always bigger than the boxes we build for him, so do not waste too much time protecting the boxes.'³

So let me begin with some thoughts about God, take a look at the problem with Jesus and then the question of sacred texts searching for a model of non exclusive Christianity that may serve us as individuals and as a global community. I will also weave in some of the nine new revelations that are being talked about since the 'Conversation with God' work began in Cape Town five years ago.

GOD
The first problem, with which all mystics contend, is the teaching of what I call a 'dislocated God'. As the name suggests, this is a God who is misplaced and set somewhere beyond his creation. A God, who is personified with human attributes and needs, exacts authority, makes demands and meets out rewards and punishments at random. While we all would say 'this is not the kind of God we believe in' - we must be honest and say that the vast majority of our liturgy, our hymns and our scriptures support the concept of a 'dislocated God'. For many Christians it is a comfortable place to be - knowing what God wants, fulfilling his demands and seeing everything as a blessing - even the so called 'testing' times. As long as we give tacit support to the idea of a separatist God, separate from us and separate from his creation we will always legitimise religious separation and make what could be a healthy celebration of diversity into a life threatening fear of difference.

In the light of the Tsunami disaster our traditional belief systems don't seem to have supported us very well. There has been a 'wave' of theological exchange from bar talk to letters to the editor, articles and religious missives. Much of it, as the Archbishop has pointed out, has little religious integrity. At least the Tsunami showed the paucity of our present theological understanding but also gives an opportunity to tell a different story.

Primitive man saw the effects of the wind and the rains, earthquakes and flood and did not know what to make of such things. They did not know why hurricanes and droughts came along and destroyed everything. In order to make sense of some of these things they concluded that there must be some power beyond themselves, greater than theirs, that made these things happen. They created myths about how these distant spirits influenced life on earth. They created a pantheon of angry gods who were in someway responsible for these disasters. The myths became the legends, which turned into belief. Thus it is recorded that God sent the flood in order to cleanse the earth.

After the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 on All Saints Day when 100,000 people perished, there were the religious believers who stated that the quake represented God's anger at Lisbon' sinful, in line with our scriptural understanding of divine anger. Voltaire was so incensed with this response he wrote Candide, satirising such religious faith. The Archbishop wrote 'God's weeping with us, wherever there is suffering and pain.'⁴. While this maybe slightly comforting it does not help to refute the erroneous notion of a God who somehow let this happen. The Archbishop seems to allow Moses' question ' why have you done evil to this people?'⁵

My feeling is that religious leaders must stop colluding with the primitive mindset that places God separate from his creation and has him orchestrating things according to his whim or fancy.

But primitive cultures not only turned to the Gods for good rains and harvests, but also for the authority to lay down behavioural rules. Our ideas of right and wrong were determined by their understanding of what the Deity wanted or needed. Elaborate societal codes of behaviour were enforced by the claim that that these rules were of divine origin and cast in stone, literally in the case of Joseph Smith and Moses.

Of course, the majority of rules that we have enshrined in our Holy Book, which we call God's word, we conveniently over rule. If my son is disobedient, and a profligate and drunkard, I am commanded by God to take him to the gate of the city and have him stoned to death. He's only nine so I haven't had to face that one yet! The definitive comment on this problem of biblical moral relativity is perhaps the letter sent to advice journalist Laura Schlesinger after she claimed biblical authority for her condemnation of Gays.⁶

The fact that religious people have made up the rules as they go along, claiming of course divine authority as they go, should lead us to a point or moral relativism or at least moral functionality. This is expressed in the CWG as the 7th revelation - there is no such thing as right or wrong only what works and what doesn't work depending on what you are trying to be, to do or to have.

The 'Tragedy of Eden' is that a primitive folk tale became a defining theological statement about the nature of God. From Eden we get that God is separate from his creation, he makes demands or rules that have to be met, and when we break the rules he gets very cross and punishes us with some kind of further banishment or separation. I would suggest that in terms of most peoples understanding of God we haven't progressed very much from the Eden model. I would also suggest that the time has come to tell people that God does not have an ego problem. He does not get hurt or upset, let alone angry or revengeful; he does not need to be placated and has no needs that must be fulfilled. It is easy of course to see how we create a God in our image but in so doing and the ensuing false belief gives us the green light to continue to 'behave badly' with each other. If God gets to destroy us if we don't behave, it somehow legitimises the kind of behaviour extolled by Ayatolla Khomeni in the 80's. ' Islam says kill the unbelievers just as they would kill you. Kill them and put them to the sword and scatter. Islam says whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and the shadow of the sword.'⁷ I would like to think that the eastern religions were less violent but I was surprised to find in the Bhagavad Gita the injunction. 'O ye who believe. Fight the unbelievers who gird you about, and let them find firmness in you. Either you will be killed on the battlefield and attain heavenly planets or you will conquer and enjoy the earthly kingdom. Therefore, get up with determination and fight.'⁸

We are left with two absurd ideas one that God has separated us from himself because we have not given him what he needs and two that there is something that God needs, needs, which he can fail to have met.

This is a hard one - could we entertain the possibility that God needs nothing, God requires nothing in order to be happy. God demands or requires nothing of anyone or anything in the universe - this is the so called 4th 'new revelation'. What then of the relationship can we truly love someone who has no needs? And what of worship? Can it be solely to satisfy our own needs?

We used to say 'how odd of God to choose the Jews.' Well maybe, just maybe - he didn't. We can understand completely how the marriage of their models of belief with their experience pf significant community events could lead to that conclusion . But what if they were misguided? What if God never shows preference or favouritism? Is it possible for us to change our minds on this one, the meta noia that Jesus calls for? Peter changed his mind after his vision and the ensuing experience with Cornelius. 'I now know that God has no favourites,' he said.⁹ And yet when it comes to religion, difference always is confused with betterment. My religion is better than yours, my holy book is better than yours, my path is better than yours - 'we are chosen you are frozen' as my Muslim friend keeps saying. What would it take, asks Neale Donald Walsch, for a few religious leaders to pronounce ' ours is not a better way ours is just another way'. His 3rd revelation suggests that no path to God is more direct than any other path. No religion is the one true religion and no people are the chosen people.

In a nonexclusive theology God emerges as one who is 'located' in the midst of Life in all its benevolence, one who neither separates nor is separate, one who neither demands nor is demanding, one who is unconditional love given unconditionally.

JESUS
As far as Jesus is concerned I've always felt that he would have had a major problem with the way that he was written up. You've probably all read some newspaper report about yourself and felt cross at being unjustly represented and misquoted. I never said that! But its too late the ink has hit the page - the damage has been done.

To my mind the Jewish teacher Jesus spoke of a kingdom that was marked by a sense of brotherhood or human connection on the one hand and a sense of unity and filial relationship with God on the other. His agenda seemed to be on a very small scale to support people in knowing that they were lovingly held in these two dimensions. A place that he called the Kingdom where there was nothing to fear and in fact nothing to do - a simple awakening to an awareness of the divine nature of life. To the lost and confused this was good news indeed - it felt like coming home.

But then there was the 'Tragedy of Pentecost.' The disciples became conscious of a new and profound sense of joy and confidence and a strong urge to share their experience of the spiritual experience of Jesus and his resurrection. Maybe Peter was the first to spill out on to the streets of Jerusalem and began preaching about Jesus and the fact of his resurrection which totally eclipsed the gospel of the kingdom which Jesus had taken great pains to teach them. So Peter and others down to St Paul created a new religion out of a new version of the gospel. The liberating religion of Jesus became a passionate religion about Jesus, and by 313 had become a methodology of power and control. 'The gospel of the kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of Galilee; Christianity on the other hand is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of St Paul'. The salvation or wholeness that was found in the fatherhood of God and sonship of man awareness became the salvation that could only be found exclusively in the person of Jesus. 'Salvation is found in no-one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.'¹⁰ Of course it was nailed to the floor early in the fifth century with Augustine's relatively recent doctrine of original sin, stating starkly that the sin of Adam dammed us all to everlasting perdition and God became incarnate in Jesus precisely to save us from hell and to enable us to live with him in heaven. I don't believe that Jesus would have said such a thing. In fact his self name, that of 'son of humanity' mentioned 79 times in the N.T., indicates one who found salvation in being able to say 'yes' to being fully human. It took Brad Brown the founder of the Life Training programme and endless Life Training Weekends of tears and passion to convince me that it is in our moments of deepest humanity that we touch our divinity. May be this is why Psalm 8 suggests that being human is a great thing to be.¹¹ The problem is that Christians have been worshipping Jesus's journey instead of doing his journey. 'The first,' says Richard Rohr, 'feels very religious, the second just feels human and not glorious at all.'¹² I believe the human task is to discover the fullness of our humanity and thereby touch our divine nature - and my Christian assertion is that we can do that best in Jesus.

But was he unique? Yes of course he was unique. But Siddarta Guatama was unique, the prophet Mohammed was unique, Mooya Chilube is unique. But we want Jesus to be uniquely unique. Can we let go of the fearful desire to make our saviour better than theirs, our prophet greater than all the others? Could we entertain the possibility that, as the third revelation states, - no prophet is the greatest prophet, no saviour is the greatest saviour.

But Jesus is the Saviour - in him we find salvation. Salvation was for Jesus a universal inclusive possibility for all. His early followers turned it to an exclusive possibility for those who believed in him.

Mathew Fox would argue that the era of Augustine's fall/redemption theology is over. 'It's a dualistic model and a patriarchal one; it begins with original sin and ends with redemption. It fails to teach about social transformation, about Eros, play, pleasure, and the God of delight. It fails to teach love of the earth or care for the cosmos, and it is so frightened of passion that it fails to listen to the impassioned pleas of the anawim of human history It's failed to help lovers celebrate their experiences as mystical and spiritual and has not proven friendly to artists, prophets, indigenous people and women.' The millennial shift of consciousness from Piscean to Aquarian is from the fall/redemption model to creation-centred spirituality. A paradigm shift from original sin to original blessing and of course from religious apartheid to religious diversity.

As Methodist Minister Peter Woods said after being moved by the experience of the Parliament of the World's Religions in Cape Town, 'I don't want to live in the ghettos and the laagers of fear any more and those who want to translate the universal gospel of Jesus into an exclusive sectarian manifesto for prejudice and continued religious apartheid, can do it without me.'

I think it would help people like Peter if we could have some new images of the passion and the atonement of Christ. The Hindu concept of the wounded healer in the sky might help. But contemporary images have their own power.

How about the little cameo that Christian Aid came up with for Christmas. 7 year old Jessica Safar, a child of Bethlehem. 3 years ago she was playing in her fathers Garage in Jerusalem when Israeli soldiers opened fire on some Palestinian youth. Her Uncle grabbed her and put her in a car and drove off. The car was hit and a piece of shrapnel entered her right eye, which had to be replaced with a false one. Whilst dealing with the psychological pain and trauma of the event she gouged out the eye of her favourite doll so it would be more like her and share her pain. She holds the wounded doll to her heart.¹⁴

How about Dave Shaw the Australian Diver who descended 271 metres of murky water to raise the bones of one Deon Dreyer. By sacrificing his own life to the depths, both saviour and saved were slowly and miraculously released and raised into the light.¹⁵

'It is futile to talk about a revival of primitive Christianity. Modern culture must now become spiritually baptised with a new revelation of Jesus' life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal and universal salvation.'¹⁶ This is the hope for the Church that individual souls will effectively reveal the true nature of Jesus.

SACRED TEXTS
Jewish academic, Dr Peter Ochs in 2003 came to Cape Town and spoke of the Children of Abraham project in Virginia and in particular the model of Interreligious study of sacred texts. Suddenly he stopped his presentation and said 'let's do it!' So about 12 of us, Muslim Jews and Christian theologians sat around the table sharing some common texts about Abraham. It was an extraordinary meeting. We shared insights from our particular faith position on some of the common texts that the three religions share. The unspoken ground rule was that no ones sacred text was any better than the other and that there was something to learn and something to inspire in the insights, interpretation and exegesis of the other. This was just one meeting, maybe ahead of its time, but it gave me a taste of the possible.

Outside of that meeting the question still stands ' What makes one collection of literature more sacred than any other?' or as Geoff asked in relation to the bible- 'When do the words become the Word of God?' His suggestion that it is the eyes of faith that turn ordinary literature into God's Holy Word, becomes all too subjective. I have known numerologists who can read phone books and discern wonderful divine wisdom from the numbers.

Surely today we can just agree that there is a wealth of inspired literature available to us. We are awash with words from beyond. Some direct revelation from within altered states of consciousness. Some channelled from the Akashic records or from individual spirit guides. Others from ' inspired or guided writing' or simply wise souls telling it as it is. Somewhere in the continuum is Neale Donald Walsh, a radio journalist whose writings began one night when at 4.00 in the morning was faced with a blank pad of paper and in a state of some depression started taking it out on God. To his amazement - his pen continued to write words in response as if God was engaging in conversation with him. 10 years and six bestsellers later his work has become the source material for the so called new revelations. His primary assertion or rather God's assertion is that God may well have spoken to us in Jesus as stated in the book of Hebrews but that was simply part of an ongoing dialogue, a conversation that continues in and through all of us, all of the time. This basically is the first revelation. ' Divine inspiration' he says, 'is the birth right of every human being.'¹⁷

Another sacred text that is always by my side is the Urantia book. In the 1930's an American Psychic in a reading asked his listeners to place a ream of paper in his bedside drawer. In the morning the papers were entirely covered with text. Copies of which were kept underground and only recently has the book become available. It has four volumes the first three of which contain information of the spiritual world that is unfamiliar to most of us. The fourth volume, which you can purchase separately, is an amazing account of the life of Jesus, which not only fills in great detail the hidden years, but gives context and background to much of the Gospel narrative.

As spiritual practitioners maybe we should be more familiar with the language of spiritual science and spiritual philosophy. For much of the knowledge that is coming through from elsewhere does not fit into the language frames of traditional religious understanding. Accordingly the unfamiliarity makes us a little unsettled, suspicious and even cynical. The message bearers are having a hard time communicating with religious people. Mooya Chiluba from a little village called Pemba in my parish in Zambia is the first acclaimed spiritual master from Southern Africa. He has revealed the original Cosmic Holy Book of God called the Logos, launched in Cape Town in May last year. If any one really wants to know what is going on in the spirit world - Logos is a good place to start!

Many of these sacred texts are truly inspirational and have the power to change lives. In fact by contrast, the bible, with so much turgid history and legal documentation, is found to be quite low on the vibrational scale. We know as preachers we sometimes have to struggle to find the inspiration from the passage set for the day.

But let us not compare. St Paul says to Timothy that 'all scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking and training in righteousness'.¹⁸ I suppose it is unclear quite to which texts he was referring, but certainly he was not referring exclusively to the Loaodician canon.

God is one who reveals, one who speaks, one who communicates. 'Those who have ears let them hear' says Jesus. For Christians today the Holy Bible must be set in the context of our experience of all other spiritual literature, from ancient scrolls to contemporary revelations and psychic readings. The gift of discernment is promised. We must have the courage to read, and to hear what God has been saying and is saying outside his pronouncement in Jesus. And of course entertain the possibility of letting go of the demand that our particular sacred text is somehow more holy, more sacred or more inspired than any one else's. Love it, study it, understand it but never be limited by it or allow God to be limited by it.

POSTSCRIPT ONE
I am concerned that most of my friends with whom I share this kind of spiritual exploration are white and a generally those who have given up on institutionalised religion. I am concerned that we are seeing another racial divide between the 'white and flaky' as the new age ladies are sometimes called and the coloured passion of middle American Christianity. I'm told that we don't have any white ordinands coming through at the moment and white church attendance is in the decline much in line with UK figures- apart, that is, from the Bergvliet, Christ Church model. My own experience of the white culture here has been through the many couples asking me to do spiritual non-religious wedding ceremonies. These are not godless people but souls seeking a living spirituality that is not based on fear or contained by the institutional religions. These are post-Christian folk, seeking an all-embracing theology that speaks of their interconnectedness with all things and their link with the divine. They would rush to evenings of Yoga, mediation, spiritual practice of all kinds even Rumi poetry evenings rather than attend mass on Sunday. Incidentally Rumi is often quoted in this regard:

The great religions are the ships, Poets are the lifeboats. Every sane person I know, Has jumped overboard! That's good for business, isn't it Hafiz.

We smile, but there is a worrying challenge here. We are the ships captains. Presumably we have to be the last to leave or go down with the boat. Or is there some way to bring some sanity into the vessel?

POSTSCRIPT TWO
I have used to the word 'new' several times. Notice that most faith communities have a bazaar fear of anything new. Quite contrary to the contemporary culture in our throw away society where new is cool and old is definitely uncool, religious institutions have a manic abhorrence of the new. If its old its worthy, if its new its unworthy. If its old its true if its new its false. If its old is right, if its new its wrong. 'You know Father I like the old tune better.'

The mention of a 'new' revelation sends believers running for cover. I suppose in the fear that some new truth may shake the secure old foundation of faith. And yet we read 'Behold I am making all things new.' Faith must be shaken, questions must be asked. The often quoted line from Revelation²⁰ must be God's way of renewing the face and the mind of the earth.

CONCLUSION
I can still hear Geoff saying 'But what about evil? What about suffering? Something is wrong with the universe! What I'm suggesting here is that the only thing that has gone wrong is the nature of our beliefs.

God says, 'Spiritual arrogance is what has caused you your greatest sorrow as a species. You have suffered more - and caused other people to suffer more over your ideas about God, than over your ideas about anything else in the human experience.'²¹

There must come a point in Christian theology when the old can be cut back to make way for the new. 'Cut off the old growth to make way for the new'. My father's gardening advice has stood me in good stead. Many a bush and shrub have found new strength and beauty by enduring my secateers. The principle must to be applied to the field of ideas and theology in order to separate the good news from the nonsense.

The most urgent need is for religious leaders to come clean - more than one Bishop has said to me ' yes I believe that, but I could never say it publicly.' Let's be honest. It's OK to say that some ancient analysis of the divine was not accurate. Let us let go of that which is clearly not supporting us as members of a planet at risk. Let us allow for some new growth, some new thoughts, which will not create greater fear, intolerance and separation but will empower, connect and sustain us in our journey to wholeness.

Don Cupitt in closing:
'For the Christian the task of working out a vision of God must take on the more human and concrete form of framing a personal vision of Christ. When we have freed ourselves from nostalgia for a cosmic Father Christmas, then our faith can at last become fully human, existential, voluntary, pure and free from superstition. To reach this goal is Christianity's destiny now approaching.'²²

John G.W. Oliver
24.01.2005. 

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¹ Joan Chittister National Catholic Reporter Nov 15th 2002
² John A.T.Robinson Honest To God SCM 1963
³ Richard Rohr Everything Belongs p.24
⁴ Njongonkulu Ndungane Letter to the Diocese of Cape Town Jan.2005
⁵ Exodus Ch.32v11
⁶ email to Dr Laura Schlesinger Quoted in NI370 August 2004
⁷ Ayatollah Khmeini quotes in Holy Terror: Inside the World of Islamic Terrorism by Amir Taheri
⁸ Bhagavad Gita Ch.2v37
⁹ Acts Ch.10 v34-35
¹⁰ Acts Ch.4 v12
¹¹ Psalm 8v5
¹² Richard Rohr Everything Belongs 1999
¹³ Matthew Fox Original Blessing P.11 1983
¹⁴ Christian Aid Child of Bethlehem Appeal 2004
¹⁵ Boesmansgat Rescue attempt. 8th January 2005
¹⁶ Urantia Book Vol 4. 195.10.1
¹⁷ Neale Donald Walsch. The New Revelations p.11
¹⁸ 2 Timothy Ch3.v16 NIV
¹⁹ Luke Ch8.v8b
²⁰ Revelation Ch21v5
²¹ Neale Donald Walsch The New Revelations 2002
²² Don Cupitt The Sea of Faith 1984 P.271