Beneath Our Religious Diversity

"Beneath our religious diversity there is a remarkably similar humanity. I am convinced that a religious unity that we have not dared hope for might now be dawning. Perhaps in the next hundred years we will come to think of the religions of the world as being as similar to one another as we today think the denominations of Christianity to be. That would be a major breakthrough in consciousness. To me such is not only possible, it is highly desirable."
The Bishop's Voice

The Task of Religion

"The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see. It is to seek a humanity that is not governed by the need for security, but is expressed in the ability to give ourselves away. It is to live not frightened by death, but rather called by the reality of death to go into our humanity so deeply and so passionately that even death is transcended. That is the call of the fully human one, the Jesus of the transformed consciousness."
Eternal Life

God Is Real

"My mind, my integrity, my intellectual questioning, and my God-experience all come together in this new image. My religious schizophrenia is at an end. Theism is dead, I joyfully proclaim, but God is real. When I stand in the presence of this God who inhabits the heart of life, I know just why I define myself as a joyful, passionate, convinced believer in the reality of God."
A New Christianity for a New World

Expressions of Christianity in the 21st Century

"I saw the death of the church visibly at the Lambeth Conference. The evangelical fundamentalist takeover of the church internationally was apparent. It is not, I am confident, that this right-wing form of Christianity is growing, as they claimed, so much as it is that thinking people in the mainline modern churches are departing, leaving these distorted evangelicals as the sole remaining voices of Christ in the public arena. I have labored through all of my career to give a credible voice to a Christianity that was in dialogue with the real world. At Lambeth that possibility seemed to be a losing cause. If the Anglican Communion can turn this far to the right, then it joins a strident fundamentalist Protestantism, an antiquated Roman Catholicism, and an irrelevant Orthodox tradition as the major expressions of Christianity at the dawn of the twenty-first century. There is no leaven in that ecclesiastical lump and no candle left to shine in that ecclesiastical darkness. I see no hope for a Christian future in any of them. There is very little in any of these conservative traditions with which I could identify. If the church was not dying, objectivity then I needed to face the fact that it was surely dying for me."
Here I Stand

In Exile

"The only thing I know to do in this moment of Christian history is to enter this exile, to feel its anxiety and discomfort, but to continue to be a believer. That is now my self-definition. I am a believer who increasingly lives in exile from the traditional way in which Christianity has heretofore been proclaimed. 'A believer in exile' is a new status in religious circles, but I am convinced that countless numbers of people who either still inhabit religious institutions or who once did will resonate with that designation."
Why Christianity Must Change or Die

God as Source

"God is the Source of Life who is worshiped when we live fully. God is the Source of Love who is worshiped when we love wastefully. God is the Ground of Being who is worshiped when we have the courage to be. Jesus is a God-presence, a doorway, an open channel. The fullness of his life reveals the Source of Love, and the being of his life reveals the Ground of All Being. That is why Jesus continues to stand at the heart of my religious life. That is also why I continue to call him 'my Lord' and to call myself a Christian. But I am a Christian who can no longer live inside the exclusive claims of my traditional theistic past."
The Bishop's Voice

Jesus

"Jesus was not divine because he was a human life into whom the external God had entered, as traditional Christology has claimed; he was and is divine because his humanity and his consciousness were so whole and so complete that the meaning of God could flow through him. He was thus able to open people to that transcendent dimension of life, love and being that we call God."
Jesus for the Non-Religious

Being a Religious Seeker

"I have always been a religious seeker. I think that all human beings are. This does not mean that I find all my ultimate answers in religion, for I am not sure that those answers are actually there to be found. It is, however, the nature of human life to seek that which is ultimate, and that seeking is what people now call religion. I have been quite aware of this activity in my own life. On many occasions during the course of my life I even convinced myself that I had found the secrets for which I was searching. While that never really turned out to be the case, it did feel good sometimes just to pretend."
Eternal Life

The New Reformation

"I am quite certain that the reassessment of Christianity that I seek to develop must be so complete as to cause some people to fear that the God they have traditionally worship is, in fact, dying. The reformation needed today must, in my opinion, be so total that it will by comparison make the Reformation of the sixteenth century look like a child's tea party. In retrospect, that Reformation dealt primarily with issues of authority and order. The new reformation will be profoundly theological, of necessity challenging every aspect of our faith-story. Because I believe that Christianity cannot continue as the irrelevant religious sideshow to which it has been reduced, I seek to engage the best minds of the new millennium in this reformation. I hope that we Christians will not tremble at the audacity of the challenge. We face today, as I will seek to document, a total change in the way modern people perceive reality. This change proclaims that he way Christianity has traditionally been formulated no longer has credibility. That is why Christianity as we have known it increasingly displays signs of rigor mortis."
A New Christianity for a New World

Homophobic Prejudices

"The time has come for all Christians to decide whether a person can follow Christ and still maintain his or her homophobic prejudices. I do not believe that is possible. Deep down all of us know this to be true. The decision is not both/and; it is either/or. We can either follow Christ or maintain our prejudices. There can be no compromise. The contending positions are mutually exclusive. There must be no wavering. Leviticus 18 and 20 cannot be allowed to remain in the lexicon of Christian behavior. It is also no longer a morally defensible argument for hierarchical figures to protect the destructive homophobia of some leaders and church members in order 'to preserve the unity of the church.' A church unified in prejudice cannot possibly be the Body of Christ. Can anyone imagine a church preserving its unity by tolerating slavery in its midst? Is there any difference between that situation and tolerating homophobia? Any prejudice based on who a person is, his or her very being as a child of God, cannot be a part of the church's life. Quoting Leviticus to justify our prejudices is no longer an option."
The Sins of Scripture