Corrections to Christianity
by Tom Baker
Lesson: Chapter 3, I. Atonement without Sacrifice, pp. 36-38 & Lesson 39
Date: September 27, 2009
When I first discovered A Course In Miracles in 1982 I was a Roman Catholic priest serving a large parish in Louisville, Kentucky called St. Gabriels. I was so enthusiastic about the Course that I immediately set up Course groups at St. Gabriels and a parish near-by called St. Raphaels. Some of the first problems that I encountered were the very clear challenges the author of the Course, implicitly Jesus himself, made in respect to the traditional theology of the Christian Church, all denominations included. Chapter 3 in the text is where these challenges begin to be most clearly articulated. As a priest and representative of the Catholic faith I began to find myself in the middle of a conflict that I could not resolve. Yet the conflict, while unsettling for me, became extremely fruitful, for it helped me to formulate a Christian faith free of fear and guilt. The Course also painted a picture of Jesus as a wise and revolutionary teacher rather than a martyred savior who took away my sins but, at the same time, suggested I feel guilty for crucifying him.
Chapter 3 begins with the declaration that the resurrection, not the crucifixion, established the Atonement. In other words, Jesus did not die for our sins. He rose from the dead to demonstrate that we were without sin, that God held nothing against us and that the risen Jesus, not the twisted, tortured figure on the cross, was the true portrait of the human being: "A further point must be perfectly clear before any residual fear still associated with miracles can disappear. The crucifixion did not establish the Atonement; the resurrection did. Many sincere Christians have misunderstood this. No one who is free of the belief in scarcity could possibly make this mistake." (T. Chap. 3, I. p. 36). In this passage from the Course, not only is the crucifixion subordinated to the resurrection, but the belief in scarcity, elsewhere in the Course called the scarcity principle, is noted as the problem underlying our misperception of God, the world, one another, and ourselves. The theologian Paul Tillich once called God "the ground of being." Scarcity might be called "the ground of non-being." Scarcity is the ground out of which fear and guilt, sin and sacrifice grow, the putrid soil in which they flourish.
When I was a priest parishioners often were puzzled and disturbed by the idea that God would subject His only son to a horrible death in order to redeem us. When I explained to them that Jesus was in effect "paying with his life the price our sins had incurred" they would almost always brighten up and reply that what God did was like we do in war. We sacrifice our sons, and now our daughters, so others can live. At last it made sense! Not very happy sense but an explanation we as human beings were quite familiar with. Jesus has no patience with what St. Augustine called "ransom theology" and attempts to set the record straight: "Can you believe our Father really thinks this way? It is so essential that all such thinking be dispelled that we must be sure that nothing of this kind remains in your mind. I was not 'punished' because you were bad. The wholly benign lesson the Atonement teaches is lost if it is tainted with this kind of distortion in any form." (T. Chap. 3, I., p. 36). Jesus follows up this clarification with one of the most striking statements in the Course and one that requires us to totally rethink some very entrenched ideas about God:
"The statement 'Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord' is a misperception by which one assigns his own 'evil' past to God. The 'evil' past has nothing to do with God. He did not create it and He does not maintain it. God does not believe in retribution. His Mind does not create that way. He does not hold your 'evil' deeds against you. Is it likely that He would hold them against me? Be very sure that you recognize how utterly impossible this assumption is, and how entirely it arises from projection. This kind of error is responsible for a host of related errors, including the belief that God rejected Adam and forced him out of the Garden of Eden." (T. Chap. 3, I., pp. 36-37).
Jesus rejects out of hand any notion of a vengeful God, a punishing God, or a God Who would in any circumstance or for any reason hurt us. He adds that God also would never ask us to sacrifice: "Sacrifice is a notion totally unknown to God. It arises solely from fear, and frightened people can be vicious. Sacrificing in any way is a violation of my injunction that you should be merciful even as your Father in Heaven is merciful [see Luke 6:36 and following, RSV translation]. It has been hard for many Christians to realize that this applies to themselves. Good teachers never terrorize their students. To terrorize is to attack, and this results in rejection of what the teacher offers. The result is learning failure." (T. Chap. 3, I. p. 37). For the most part the Christian Church is an example of this learning failure. The Course and other channeled and psychic material like that of Edgar Cayce, Emmanuel, Abraham, Conversations with God, and the Unity Church attempt to take the sin, the judgment, and the threat out of the teaching of Jesus and replace it with innocence, blessing, and the assurance that the universe is a wholly safe place: "The lion and the lamb lying down together symbolize that strength and innocence are not in conflict, but naturally live in peace…….Innocence is incapable of sacrificing anything, because the innocent mind has everything and strives only to protect its wholeness." (Chap. 3, I., p. 37).
One of the workbook lessons which applies these corrections is Lesson 39, My holiness is my salvation. Nothing outside our true nature, our holiness, saves us, including Jesus. This lesson is a clear window into the mind of God and in the fourth paragraph provides a succinct alternative to the punitive Christian theology of the last 2000 years: "Your holiness is the answer to every question that was ever asked, is being asked now, or will be asked in the future. You holiness means the end of guilt, and therefore the end of hell. Your holiness is the salvation of the world, and your own. How could you to whom your holiness belongs be excluded from it? God does not know unholiness. Can it be He does not know His Son?"
The lesson applies our holiness by having us experience how our unloving thoughts about anything or anyone, including ourselves or anything about us, are keeping us in a hell consciousness. We are asked simply to practice returning to our own holiness to know salvation, to know that we are the light of the world and to see the light we are in all we behold.
Next week I will continue with this material in class and perhaps write a short piece based upon it. What follows is a sermon I wrote and delivered 30 years ago at St. Meinrad Seminary on the Feast of Guardian Angels which is coming up this Friday, October 2nd. In a very simple way it reflects the innocence talked about in the Course.
The Guardian
Delivered in the St. Meinrad Seminary Chapel
On the Feast of Guardian Angels, October 2nd, 1979
By Tom Baker, deacon and seminarian
Several Christmases ago the Book-of-the-Month Club gave all of its members a little book about angels. Christmas, they figured, is a time for angels. A clever booklet about angels would be just right for the season. The little book was in perfect taste. It neither ridiculed angels, nor did it glorify them; the booklet simply illustrated a feature of Christmas---a colorful addition to a holiday coffee table. For the Book-of-the-Month Club angels were just another charming legend of Christmas. For us angels may not be exactly legends, but they often are little more than curiosities.
It is hard for us to celebrate the Feast of Guardian Angels because we have pretty much stopped believing in angels. We really don't take angels seriously anymore. We connect angels with a pie in the sky spirituality nourished by statues that look like embalmed people. If we hear of someone who has a special devotion to angels we immediately picture those self condemning, creepy religious folks who clutter their houses and their lives with a lot of transcendental junk. For them an angel is either a fat little air born baby, or a cow eyed young man in a gown and wings. Popular piety has made angels ridiculous. The idea of a guardian angel is even more outrageous. One thinks of a feathery secret service agent shadowing your every move, hustling you away from temptations to impurity; screaming for you to tromp on the breaks just in time. The caricatures of angels drawn in the dust of centuries are hardly believable. So what are we celebrating today? Do we believe in angels? Can we really take angels seriously anymore?
If we turn to the Gospels and look at when angels appear, we find them showing up at times when people need to trust God, trust God unconditionally. Angels pop up at moments when enormous faith is demanded, not requested, demanded. An angel gives Zechariah the unbelievable news that creaky old Elizabeth, despite hardening of the arteries and arthritis, is going to have a baby. Zechariah laughs in the angel's face. Gabriel lets him have it. Zechariah loses his cynicism and his voice to an angel's fury. Mary, untouched, barely wooed, learns from Gabriel that she is suddenly to be a mother, because nothing is impossible to God. Mary did not laugh. She trusted the angel. And here we are. With Herod's Gestapo agents bearing down on them, an angel tells Joseph to hightail it out of Palestine. Without a question the carpenter hustles his wife and child off to Egypt that very night. In the Wilderness, his head spinning from Satan's legalistic riddles, the Master is watched over by angels. At Gethsemane, Jesus, not at all sure of himself, lonely and in tears, is ministered to by angels. And it is an angel, perched on a rock, dangling his bright, bare feet, who tells the women at the tomb the quizzical news that becomes the Good News: "He is risen." Faith. Trust. The occasion for an angel. It is strange that at times when the need for faith is greatest an angel appears. When there is no time for redaction, no more room for doubt, when people need most to trust God, suddenly there is an angel.
There are two groups in society, two often oppressed minorities, who still believe in angels. Each of us has belonged to the first group and we will all, of necessity, someday join the second. The first group of angel enthusiasts is young children, the second group is the dying. Young children have no trouble with angels at all. In fact, little kids are rather delighted with the whole idea. Superman, Spiderman, the Enormous Hulk are all secular angels; real angels are even better. The dying, according to Kubla Ross and others often have strange visitors whom they sometimes know as angels. "Hallucinations of despair," mumbles the doctor absently, thinking of his golf game that afternoon. But the dying patient muses to herself, "At last a messenger of hope!"
Young children and the dying share the same dependencies. Both are subject to the same humiliations. Both groups depend on others to feed and wash them. Young children must be carried to the bathroom; the dying often must have the bathroom carried to them. Humiliating. Undignified. An occasion for unquestioning trust. An occasion for angels. Maybe the reason we don't believe in angels is that we don't have to. Unlike young children and the dying we can take care of ourselves. We have a self-actualizing spirituality, we're grown-up, we're healthy. Ours is an adult Church. Angels, bah! Pre-Vatican II curiosities. Fantasies for kids and old folks.
In the Gospel for today (Matthew 18: 1-5, 10) Jesus' disciples approach him with their favorite question: "Who's going to be number one in the Kingdom of Heaven? Who will be numero uno in the big pecking order in the sky?" Probably exasperated, Jesus grabs a child from the back row, a kid with chocolate on his face and a dirty diaper whose been standing on tip toe, trying to see over all these grown-up's fat heads. Jesus holds him up and, in effect, says, "Being number one is being like this little kid. In the Kingdom of Heaven great is small & small is great, and Guardian Angels are a part of the small that is great." At the moment when that child comes to live for good in our hearts; at that moment when we leap into the clear, dark space between survival and surrender, where faith is no longer a matter of religious belief but a demand of life itself. At that moment we may meet our Guardian Angel, and we might say to him (or her), "Why, I believed in you when I was a little child." And the angel may reply, "And I have believed in the child in you all along."
© Copyright Tom Baker 2009