Free Christians Australia
SPIRITUAL LIFE ISSUES

FORGIVENESS:
 14 STEPS

Intimacy with Jesus - The uniqueness of Jesus

Was Jesus a Christian? -
 Rowland Croucher

Preparation for talking with God
 The God of the Universe

Links to Articles	Links to Articles
Only in God can we find spiritual safety by Bryan Patterson, FAITHWORKS (Sunday Herald 04 May 2003) Living in peace and trust in the love of God  May we please God? - It depends on the kind of God we are talking about The Shadow Side of Religion by T George Harris When prayers don't heal, does that mean our faith is weak? Efficacy of prayer: Loving, individual and endless action of God. See also: Action and Providence of God, his Power and his Kindness  God as Love, not Monster - David Dulley All You Really Need is Love Don Cupitt  The Mystery of Prayer Jed Perkins What is "Spirituality"?  Finding God's Will, or Hearing God's Voice? Rejecting formulas to find guidance. Wired for Faith  by Fr. Ted Stylianopoulos ( professor of the New Testament at the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Mass ) To be dependent on faith is to be human. To have faith in God is to turn that which is feeble into a vibrant and joyful gift. Spiritual Life and the Survival of Christianity Louis Dupré What Is a Psychologically Healthy Spirituality? by Paschal Baute God is everywhere and we in Him - God "controls" everything Spirituality for Passionate and Rapidly Changing Times by Carolyn M. Craft... Reflections on prayer and spirituality by an Episcopal priest and professor in the department of English, philosophy, and modern languages. ( Longwood College, Farmville, Virginia ). From IQ to SQ  by T George Harris... Aspects of spiritual-intelligence (forgiveness, hope, gratitude) have been found to be good for your health Prayer, Meditation, and Contemplation What the greatest Christian mystics had to say about prayer The Philokalia an 18th century anthology of Orthodox spirituality that was compiled from texts which had been written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries .© 1999 by D. Platt See the Great Changes in Australian Sprituality Absolute assurance in Jesus Christ By Charles Slagle The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard A classic written by one of the nineteenth century's greatest theologians. Christian must think dauntlessly about everything both earthly and worldly, including death and its relation to living an authentic life	Why the Christian Life Doesn't (seem to) Work The Christian life cannot be lived out of the self-effort of approaching it as a project, a promotional effort, a panacea, or propriety. By James A. Fowler Conviction of Sin By Mike Williams Disappointment: Recovering Your Ideals Is there such a thing as a CHRISTIAN with DEPRESSION ? The answer is yes. But... there IS Hope In Sight ! Time to Draw the Line Between the Past and the Possible Finding a Place for Emotions  by Gregory S. Clapper.  "The theologian must see that the emotions have definite implications for the Christian life and that the Christian story has important implications for the affectional life" The Pains of our Vulnerability the Lessons that Follow Great Teacher Series - Gregory Palamas "In a word, we must seek a God in whom we can participate in one way or another, so that by participating, each of us, in the manner proper to each and by the analogy of participation, may receive being, life and deification" The New Being by Paul Tillich (ENTIRE BOOK) In these twenty-two sermons Dr. Tillich has translated into lay language the insights of his theological thoughts and has developed a most effective way of re-expressing, in terms which will be immediately grasped by present-day congregations, the basic human experiences to which the Biblical and ecclesiastical terminology point.  A Meaning Worthy of God: Origen and Biblical Integrity in a Pre-Constantinian Age "The “inner meaning” of Scripture, then, is what the Spirit intends to communicate in the words of the Bible, and it is the job of the interpreter to seek this “spiritual” meaning. The “method” employed by Origen is the same used by philosophers “to find symbolic meaning in the texts of Homer and the other poets” - the allegorical method." Prayer for openness to new beliefs - Oh God, Spirit of God! Finding a Place for Emotions by Gregory S. Clapper.  "The theologian must see that the emotions have definite implications for the Christian life and that the Christian story has important implications for the affectional life" The Philokalia an 18th century anthology of Orthodox spirituality that was compiled from texts which had been written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries.© 1999 by D. Platt Gateway into God's Realm (Sermon) By Gary A. Wilburn Conforming to YOUR Image of God By Gary Amirault A Huge Dissatisfaction - A Liberating Sprituality Wisdom Christianity Articles and Reviews by Bruno Barnhart
Feature Article
A New Faith - What Will We Believe About God and Religion? by Dr Francis Macnab (St Michael's Uniting Church, Melbourne) Here and in America, when polls on religion are conducted a substantial majority of the population say they believe in God. For many mainline churches and pietistic and fundamentalist groups, that is a highly positive poll. A rational mature evaluation would see it as nonsense. The majority of people who believe in God see their belief in a God who will guarantee some kind of protection. He does not. We all know that high numbers of strong believers were killed in the World Trade Center disaster, and in any other disaster you care to name. The majority of people who believe in God are also believing that God is watching from above and keeping account of their sins. That view is nonsense. God is not up there somewhere, and God is not a human like judge punishing people for their sins. He would never get a day off. It is an absurd image. It is a negative punitive frightened view of life inculcated by the propaganda of the churches' preachers and theologians. The majority of people who believe in God believe he's male, that he is a giant father figure and he is all powerful, almighty, omnipotent. To doubt God's power is to doubt the very existence of God. But if God is an all-powerful being, why doesn't he use his power…? Why doesn't he answer our urgent prayer for a cure of some dreadful disease …? Why does he let little children suffer dreadfully and die? The idea of God's omnipotence is simply a bad idea, and it does not stack up. A good percentage of those who say they believe in God, will perhaps, point to Jesus. They believe Jesus was God! Don't the hymns we sing at Christmas say, God came down from heaven in Jesus Christ. "veiled in flesh the Godhead see hail the incarnate Deity…" "Mild he lays his glory by born that man no more may die" (Hark the Herald Angels sing!) Nonsense really. Read the obituaries in The Herald-Sun tomorrow! The birth of Jesus did not slow down the death rate! We are drowning in fiction; and unless we can do better in this - our time - then we can surely understand why so many defect form the churches, and search for some form of personal spirituality. In fact Jesus was not advocating a personal spirituality though he commended a spiritual wisdom and intelligence. What seems to have happened was this - There was the person Jesus, the scholars call this Jesus the "Historical Jesus." After he was executed, the early people realized just how significant he was. They began to construct stories around him; they used poetry, myth, imagination, and soon the Historical Jesus was lost under the continual layers of stories and beliefs they loaded on him. They made a distinction between Jesus the person, and Jesus "the Christ" - the special one sent by God. Then came the Christianity of church councils with their creeds, their dogma, their demands, their burnings, their crusades, their determination to evangelize the world, their arrogance that there was only one way to God; and there followed the propaganda of Christianity, the preaching of Jesus saving people from their sins, and offering a place in heaven after you die. It was never far away from fear and guilt, human degradation and human impoverishment - the opposite in fact from what Jesus taught. Listen to these words: "Amazing Grace - How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see." Who these days, wants to be a wretch? * * * * * * * * * * * So we had Jesus the person And a second layer of stories and myths And a third layer of creeds and dogma And a fourth layer of propaganda and distortion And a fifth layer of demands, threats and vacuous promises Alongside of that we have a highly selected bible that was brought together in the New Testament by the Council of Florence in 1442, and the bible as a whole was approved by the Council of Trent in 1546. This was also accompanied by claims that this bible was the infallible word of God. But if it is read with even minimal knowledge, you realize it was not the word of God but it was men writing about their understanding of God, and the unfolding of human events; and even some of the history is faulty. What did the Scholars of the Jesus Seminar say at their 2003 convention? 1. Dr Charles Hedrich: The search for the Historical Jesus offers the church in the twenty first century an opportunity to draw its own inferences about Jesus. The only other time when this was possible was in the first century. Unless we respond to this then the archaic world view, which swallowed the personal Jesus in the first century will eventually leave the churches looking silly. 2. Dr Robert Funk said "the time has come for Christian scholars to discriminate what is mythical from what is historical in the interests of their own integrity and in the interests of a reduction in Christian arrogance, a trait notably lacking in the Historical Jesus." He said, "We have entered a new age." "The Historical Jesus is a reality anchor in a sea of unrealistic and potentially demonic dreams. It demands honesty and candor." 3. Dr Ray Hoover said, "The Seminar's collaborative effort to find the evidence of the authentic words and deeds of Jesus is an attempt to discover the truth about the Jesus of history by using the investigative methods that have proven to be indispensable in the post-Galileo world, the world we live in." 4. One scholar from Finland said, preachers were putting up answers to questions that nobody was asking. Charles Hedrick said, many church folk… suspend credulity for a few hours each week so that they can continue their long association with the church. "But what happens when such people decide they can no longer live with the inconsistency of 'suspended credulity' and conclude that faith may simply not require them to believe something they know to be patently false? The twenty first century question for the church will be: how long can it count on 'suspended credulity' to shore up the outworn myths of its mythic gospel?" * * * * * * * * * * * What do we have that is now important? 1. As we discover the Historical Jesus we find he is challenging us to see God in a new way. We live post-Galileo, post-Darwin, post-Freud. Jesus historically lived in that pre-first century, and had no first hand awareness of the world of the twenty first century. He was not able to address such issues. So we must draw inferences on the basis of his vision of the truly best humanity. Many of the scholars said: we need to learn to see God in a new way. We need to stop conjuring up a God upstairs, a man-centered universe, a punitive father God. Rather God is the stream of life with which we seek harmony and energy and inspiration. God is the presence that gives us a sense of being part of something which is bigger than ourselves, something that is good, and something that gives a strong meaning to our lives. 2. We see that the Historical Jesus did not claim to be God. That was a huge turning point for the scholars. Rather he was a visionary pointing to the various pathways of our fullest and best humanity. He was not about an encircled spirituality, but a spirituality that was released into our fullest humanity - based on the difficult ethic of loving your enemies, of love as a way to be, and based on people finding each other's best humanity in communities. 3. We have to see that the Historical Jesus met a grim end. Yet he saw the way of God was the way of goodness, in spite of everything. It is so easy to be swept into all kinds of pretense, and denial, and arrogance about the way of goodness. And we know how many of us can be "good" in several spheres but are not on the pathways of goodness in other spheres. The Historical Jesus did not recommend confession and remorse as primary. Rather he kept saying: choose. Choose goodness. Choose life. Choose the big view. Chose God's way, God's realm, the Kingdom. Said Dr Droover, "Goodness must guide society if the life of its members has any hope of being worth living, but goodness has never ruled alone in any human society." We need to act in ways "to bring human life in the modern world, as much as realistically possible, under the rule of the good." Bear in mind, said Miroslav Volf, "every great theology has been a vision of a way of life." 4. In asking the questions - how will we speak of God and religion, the focus came strongly on how we will worship God in a new way. We heard how a black church does it. We heard how a small church devoted to the AIDS community/networks does it. We heard how a very wealthy large congregation does it. One speaker said it was time to revoke the worship which is one of obeisance, requesting the favor and mercy of the divine majesty. He said the weekly tradition of prayers of confession and absolution owes its place to a theological paradigm of sin and human unworthiness. It seems to assume that "the people of the church are capable of nothing in the future other than repeating the same pathetic failures every week their whole lives long." (Droover) The real experience of worship needs to be quite different. Let it be people realizing "they are part of a large order of life for which they feel gratitude and a measure of responsibility. They are more likely to be looking for encouragement and wisdom" than reminders of their inadequacy and failure. So let worship be a gathering of people to affirm their belief in: 1. Life, the source of life, the gift of life, the possibilities of life and gratitude for life. 2. God as the presence that we want to explore, and with which we seek a harmony and strengthening communion. 3. The way of God as the way of goodness, a goodness that needs to be reinterpreted for different situations. But on top of it that, let it be a celebration, a celebration of every sign of goodness, a celebration of every glimpse of God's good presence in our lives and in our world.

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