O’Murchu’s 12 Theses

Sacred Heart Missionary priest and social psychologist Diarmuid O’Murchu visited Melbourne in January but had to reschedule his venue after Archbishop Denis Hart withdrew permission for the lecture tour because a complaint about O’Murchu’s writing was before Vatican authorities at the time. Workshops were held at Janet Clarke Hall in the University of Melbourne. Here, Professor Hedley Beare writes on O’Murchu’s key message from his new book.

By Hedley Beare

In the first chapter of Catching up with Jesus, headed ‘Bringing Jesus out of Captivity’, O’Murchu endeavours to describe the anachronistic frameworks which are handicapping our understanding of who Jesus was and is, what he represents, and his central message about the ‘Kingdom of God’. In the following, I have tried to make a précis of that important chapter.A précis differs from a summary in that it attempts to use as far as is possible the original author’s own words. My purpose has been to reduce O’Murchu’s ideas to an accessible length so that they can be made readily available to a wide reading audience and form the basis of ongoing discussion and action so that we comprehend how much the old frameworks had to be remodelled.

Christianity has a fossilized story, says Lisa Underwood. Its living characteristics have been set in rock by outdated language and obsolescent thought-forms. For much of the twentieth century, scholars have been chipping away the cultural debris which has accumulated around the story of Jesus – efforts which have led to a reconstruction of the Jesus story.

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Why have we been so preoccupied with the divinity of Jesus? Robert Funk, leader of the Jesus Seminar, says that on innumerable occasions in his thirty years of researching and speaking he has been asked if he believed in the divinity of Jesus, but never once in all those years was he asked if he believed in the humanity of Jesus. A fixation on Jesus’ divinity may well distract us from knowing who Jesus really is.

Because of the dominance of the idea that we discover truth through rationality and not through imagination and intuition, the Jesus story became a set of facts around which his life was written and explained. Because the dominant culture could not handle, contain, or control this creative dreamer who spoke in parables, metaphors and stories, he came to be represented as of royal lineage, with patriarchal status as the first-born son, a member of a conventional Jewish family, indeed a loyal Jew, and one subservient and obedient to his Father.

But he was obviously a creative rebel against all those things, passionate about justice, a visionary with a prophet’s imagination, and wild. He defied convention, transgressed the boundaries which incapacitated the poor and the marginalized, flouted the sacred hopes of the established order, and called for a new form of governance based on radical equality. Only when we choose to liberate Jesus from the tedium of the rational and the literal can we truly come to terms with the divinely illuminated Wisdom-sage that he was.

“It would never have occurred to anyone to doubt God’s existence if theologians had not tried so hard to prove it,” wrote Anthony Collins. The creeds became a constellation of dogmatic truths, deemed to be binding for all time, and not subject to review or modification, with God depicted as the supreme ruler whose power flows down to the church leaders. Power, not faith, is the core value the creeds enunciate and proclaim.

So God’s power is represented as passing down unadulterated through a line of male succession via the only-begotten son (even though the Holy Spirit is intentionally feminine). There is absolute

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Most of the story begins in Africa where humans first evolved some six million years ago.The black colour of human skin is more basic to human identity than the Caucasian façade introduced by colonisation.

Yet Christian theology is still largely the preserve of white western specialists. Most efforts to comprehend Jesus in the Southern Hemisphere begin with the colonised version of Jesus invented by Europe.

We need to disrobe the kingly figure, representing power and the glory of triumphalism, and reclaim the vulnerable suffering servant. In a multifaith context, we also need a Jesus who is acceptable in and can dialogue with diverse cultures.

For some thousands of years before Jesus,only males were seen as full human beings, alone possessing the seed through which new life was procreated. Women were merely the biological receptacles for the fertilisation of the male’s seed. Male offspring perpetuated the family line and were valued above females.

These archaic and destructive beliefs still persist, not least in the descriptions of Jesus. In the birth narratives, for example, we romanticise the angelic heralds, the virgin (pure) mother, the Jesus-seed as provided by the third person of the Trinity, the traveling star in the firmament, the wise men, the only begotten son, and so on, allowing these elements to distract us from the main message.

Jesus did not adopt this male stereotype of dominance, control, rationality, and remoteness. Instead of guarding power, he gives it away; instead of rational discourse, he tells stories; instead of claiming rabbi status, he engages the outcasts; instead of excluding the rabble, he includes them at the fellowship of his meal table. Relationality rather than rationality pervades his whole story.

Indeed, Jesus’ behaviour is far more androgenous (a mix of masculine and feminine propensities) than people have been willing to admit. He disturbs the orthodoxies of then and now.

We must admit that a Jesus devoid of an exuberant and joyful sexuality would strip incarnation of its meaning and integrity.

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seemed heroic enough to satisfy a bloodthirsty, sacrificial system.

Ecclesiastical domestication

Following Jesus has become concomitant with allegiance to one or other Christian denomination. The churches themselves are patterned on the organisation from Roman society.Their formats camouflage what Jesus stood for.

The strategies Jesus used were both paradoxical and subversive – paradoxical because the liberation which people yearned for would be delivered not by imperial and political intervention but by an empowerment from the ground up; and subversive because it undermined royal patronage to its very core. The one and only time Jesus approved of people calling him a king, he chose to ride on a donkey whereas a king always rode on a horse.

Jesus’ behaviour must have astounded the people of his culture, because he was forever breaking religious laws and flouting religious tradition. As Leonardo Boff puts it, he demythologised religious language, deritualised piety, emancipated the message of God from its connection to one religious community, and secularised the means of salvation.

The twelve wanted Jesus to be an heroic messianic figurehead, and they became increasingly disillusioned as well as disabused. St Paul in many ways understood better the inclusive, liberating vision of Jesus, but by the time of the incorporation of Christianity into the Roman world in the fourth century, the church had become institutionalised according to a paradigm that betrayed Jesus’ original vision of the Kingdom. From there on, ecclesiastical domestication took over.

Today, that domestication is in disarray. The institutional church struggles to mobilise the credibility of its disenchanted followers.The firm hand of ecclesiastical control is rapidly losing its grip as people grow up and engage with their faith not as passive children but as questioning adults.This is precisely what the church has had difficulty in appropriating, indoctrinated as its members have been in subservience, in obedience through suffering, and in a kind of infantile mind-set. It has taken two thousand years for Christian people to catch up with Jesus who leads us to an adult faith. We are now seeing several ruptures and schisms emerging in the contemporary domesticated churches.

But there are at least twelve chains that still bind and imprison what we have inherited from two thousand years of Christendom.

If God has been fully at work at every stage of the evolutionary process, then divine involvement must include the period from the very beginning of the cosmos as we know it, bearing in mind that the human species appeared six million years ago.

‘Incarnation’ does not begin two thousand years ago with the birth of Jesus, therefore, but at least six million years ago with the emergence of humans. ‘Incarnation’ can be rescued from its narrow anthropomorphic restrictions by using the biblically and culturally more responsible term ‘embodiment’, which includes the cosmos, our home planet, and not just the human body.To use Jesus’ birth as the starting point of ‘incarnation’ is a form of reductionism.

So our creation story has to be reconceptualised. Human beings are just one of billions of species that inhabit this planet, and we do not have the right to conquer and control them all. Stewardship differs from control. Human beings have been co-creators with God during six million years, and the process of natility (becoming, flourishing) has been awesomely successful. It has brought us to a new threshold of evolution, a transbiological state which Teilhard de Chardin calls psychic evolution, the epitome of the new humanity represented by the resurrected Jesus.

In striving to give prime attention to the divinity of Jesus, we have caricatured his humanity in a way that seriously compromises the divine potential of the human itself. We have consistently put Jesus on a pedestal, avoiding his challenge to adopt a radically new way of being human. Indeed, the human desire for absolute power drove the doctrines and creeds resulting from the councils at Nicea and Chalcedon.

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clarity about the one on the top, a clear chain of command from the top down, a line of protection and promotion for the ruling class, with those at the bottom of the pyramid required to behave with unquestioning obedience. It is good for those in power, but dogma like this disempowers the rest of us.

Even a cursory glance at the synoptic gospels reveals that Jesus does not belong to this paradigm. Some Christians have broken out of the tyrannical model, internalising their faith through a commitment of heart and mind rather than basing their faith on external observances.There is now a sense of suspicion abroad in the contemporary Christian world about male-dominated hierarchical models, and when we retrieve Jesus from the patriarchal straitjacket, the whole Christian edifice begins to feel shaky, insecure, and unreliable. It is not at all clear what the next move is.

It transpires that Christian faith is a lived experience and not merely intellectual assent to a creedal formula. Such formulae, however, lead to social and religious classification, defining those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’, and it has become the base for legitimising much racism, bigotry, sectarianism of many kinds, witch hunts and brutal exterminations.

The Romanising of the Christian church has had a staggering impact on Christian iconography, perpetrating a white, male Jesus, bearded, and robed like the ancient Roman. Equally widespread is the caricature of a white,unreal,European Mary,virgin, poised in humble subservience. Even Catholic countries like Brazil and the Philippines in their processional ceremonies have borrowed directly from Spain and Portugal, with Mary dressed and crowned as a queen ruling from on high, an irony in cultures where the cult of the Great Mother Goddess flourished in ancient times. Yet both Jesus and Mary were people of Palestinian ethnic origin of dark skin and distinctive non-European features.

It is not a case of trying to re-invent Jesus. If he is the incarnational representation of God who co-creates throughout the whole of creation and through six million years of human evolution, then we need a creation story which honours those archetypal, primordial realities.

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“Can anyone imagine a more obsessional phantasm,” wrote Antoine Vergote, “than that of a God who demands the torturing of his own Son to death as satisfaction for his anger?” The notion of sacrifice has been a central feature of both ancient and modern cultures, and is connected to the ritual of blood-shedding. Since earliest times blood has been deemed to be the primary channel of the universal life force. To placate the angry life-giver on high, blood-letting or blood-shedding became the means of appeasement or propitiation, and it was further established by the myth of the ravaging male hunter, killing animals so that his tribe could feed, live and survive.The death of Jesus was taken to be the ultimate act of sacrifice.

The notion of ‘victory’ then crept in to the rhetoric along with the notion of a ruling vindictive God who seemed, particularly in the Jewish scriptures, to be pleased with the slaying of his enemies and whose glory was enhanced by victory of the sword.These two ideas became entangled in the Jesus story, and the idea of salvation by death on a cross gained momentum which rendered further scapegoating unnecessary.

The concept of scapegoating has now been extensively studied, and it now appears that blood sacrifice is in fact an invention of a patriarchal period which began about ten thousand years ago, which evolved from an anthropomorphic world-view, and which saw man as the measure of all things. There is scant evidence for it before that time.

For Jesus, however, nonviolence is at the heart of the new dispensation, including love and forgiveness even for enemies.The early church missed the message of life and ended up exalting death as the primary catalyst for redemptive liberation.

The cult of redemptive violence has inspired many to shed their blood and to give their lives for the glory of God and the salvation of humanity; but it is a male martyrology promoted by a male-led church.

The Kingdom of God, however, is about life radically lived to the full; resurrection is not so much about death as about the affirmation of that kind of life.The woman’s contribution to improving the quality of life through care for the land, mothering, home-making, caring for the sick and poor, and educating the marginalized has never

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Middle class respectability

As a maverick visionary of the new reign of God, Jesus shook the foundations of his inherited culture. To the religious figureheads and authorities, he was a pest whom they wanted to get rid of. Two thousand years later, Jesus is still held captive by middle-class respectability. Christians are expected to behave according to culturally sanctioned norms of allegiance, fidelity, obedience and respect; they are expected to conform with the laws of both church and state, and to accept the hierarchical structures that prevail in developed societies.

Although Christians are expected to be kind and charitable, too much talk about rights and justice is considered left-wing and perceived to be alien to true Christianity.

The following of Jesus is not a respectable religion and was never meant to be. Christians are called to be different and should be recognised as being different, otherwise they have lost their ability to be salt of the earth and light of the world.

In conventional understandings, martyr-like suffering is the unique mark of Christian dedication. The martyr option, however, is based on spurious rhetoric arising from the theory of redemptive violence. In the present time at least, the option to live for Jesus rather than to die for Jesus is what is truly heroic, for it requires a radical commitment to the values embodied in the vision of the new reign of God.

What is truly revealing about divine incarnation is that salvific power in human life resides in connectedness and not in single individuals. The cherished paradigm of personhood in the west is that of the self-reliant, individualized, rational, responsible human being. This is an understanding originally developed in ancient Greece and in writers like Plato and Aristotle; but it is an understanding of personhood notably absent from the indigenous cultures of Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. In those cultures there is an alternative understanding far more widespread than the west assumes, namely that “at all times I am the sum of my relationships and that is what constitutes my identity”. It assumes that for much of our evolutionary development humans were seen to be enmeshed in and connected not only in tribes but also with nature.