Thank you for that kind introduction, ____; and hi to you all here tonight, also to folks watching via livestream—great to be presenting at PC Forum again.
So, New Romans: is it time to update Paul’s mighty Letter to the Romans, written now nearly 2000 years ago? My answer is, obviously, a very definite YES! Long overdue, in fact, because even though the Letter was ground-breaking for its time – it was Paul’s longest and most important letter, laying the foundations for Christian doctrine and practice to this day—the flaws of the theology it unfolds, based as it is on the old religious, creationist worldview of his day, are, in my view, the cause of all the problems the Christian Church has experienced—all the divisions, conflict, corruption—to the present day—and if followers of Jesus have ever done any good in the world—as I think they definitely have—it has mostly been in spite of the policies and actions of the institutional church!
Now, you might be licking your lips at the thought of someone, finally, taking on Pauline theology; or, you might have smoke already coming out of your ears at the mere thought of someone daring to rewrite a book of Holy Scripture! But let me emphasize that this—my New Romans Project, an update of Paul’s original letter for a 21st century audience (you can read the early chapters of it through my website, fergusmcginley.com)—is very much a work in progress, which I approach “in weakness with great fear and trembling”—to borrow Paul’s words from another of his letters. You’ll be the judge at any rate, and I’m looking forward to hearing your responses and questions at the end of this presentation.
So, here’s the plan for tonight:
Firstly, I’ll talk about the things that are right with Paul’s letter, especially his wonderful focus on Grace and Faith.
Then, I’ll talk about the things that are wrong with Paul’s letter: his very natural adherence to the old religious worldview of Creation and Fall of his day, with its omnipotent creator God; and his seeming disregard of Jesus’ key teachings on Metanoia – repentance, spiritual rebirth or transformation.
Then, we’ll make the critical transition to our new, modern scientific, non-creationist, evolutionary view of the universe, and basically begin the story again, starting from evidence, looking closely at the key teachings of Jesus that Paul seems to disregard, attempting to build an inductive, non-mystical, experience-based theology, in contrast to Paul’s speculative, deductive approach. We’ll follow roughly the plan of the first three chapters of Paul’s letter:
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- Firstly, we’ll build a new conception of God as Divine Parent rather than omnipotent creator
- Then we’ll look at the pivotal role of the Law
- Then we’ll focus on Jesus’ key teachings and build a conception of him as a human trailblazer of Metanoia not divine Son of the old creator God
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So, let’s get going; firstly:
What do we know about Paul? Well, before his famous, dramatic Damascus Road conversion, it’s believed he was a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish religious establishment of the day, involved, in fact, in violent persecutions of Jesus’ early followers. Paul was a contemporary of Jesus, he was converted maybe only about two years after Jesus’ death, and even though Paul may have never met Jesus in the flesh, he would surely have been well aware of Jesus when he was alive, would almost certainly have known Jesus’ main teachings.
At a certain point, however—this is the famous conversion experience—Paul seems to become radically aware that Jesus—something about him, his teachings, the way he lived his life, his dramatic crucifixion death—is somehow the gamechanger for humanity – the solution to our most pressing and urgent problem, namely Sin.
So, he sets out to understand and explain what the whole Jesus thing is about, and to do so he comes up with a radical, groundbreaking innovation of Old Testament Judaism—he’s a Pharisee, after all. He connects Jesus with divine Grace, a unique, gratuitous intervention by God, through the Spirit, to “save us” from the consequences of sin, giving us a second chance after we blew it the first time in the Garden.
This is a marvel: grace gratuitously granted us by the great creator God themself, through Jesus, to save us; something no effort of our own can achieve—we can’t save ourselves! It’s beautiful, it has profound truth in it, truth we absolutely need to hear—but …
… and now we get to what’s wrong with Paul’s letter:
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- Paul makes just that immediate, fatal misstep: he, very naturally, being a good Pharisee, attempts to interpret Jesus in terms of what he knows best: Old Testament Judaism, with its now defunct worldview of Creation and Fall.
- Paul’s account of how Jesus solves the problem of sin and Fall—atonement, grace, faith—is indeed ground-breaking, a marvel of logical, deductive reasoning. But even if the outcome is true—Jesus does somehow save us—Paul’s account is essentially wrong because he starts from the wrong worldview, including, in particular, as we’ll see, the wrong understanding of the nature of sin in the first place.
- Paul’s account of grace is indeed a radical innovation, but because he is stuck in the old religious worldview, he comes up with a cut-down, legalistic version of grace, as a formal pardon, forgiveness from God—the old creator God who has previously judged and punished us for our sin.
- Paul seems to pay little attention to what Jesus actually says, especially his key teachings about Metanoia and Kingdom. Think of all those memorable sayings of Jesus, eminently quotable, that Paul would surely have had access to, either orally or in written form, even if the Gospels were not yet compiled: not one of them finds its way into any of Paul’s letters! Instead, Paul clearly has his own agenda from the outset: to turn Jesus the man into Jesus the Christ, the Messiah or Saviour, not just of the Jews, but of all humanity.
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So, given all these things that are both right and wrong with Paul’s letter, let’s now make the critical transition to our new, scientific, evolutionary worldview, and see if we can make a fresh start—remember, we’re going to follow roughly the first three chapters of Paul’s letter.
Firstly, Paul version, in Chapter 1 of his letter: after some initial greetings and a prayer for his friends in Rome, Paul comes out with all guns blazing:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth …. Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse … they became futile in their thinking …. Claiming to be wise, they became fools … They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator …” [1:18-25]
Help! And it just gets worse:
“For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural… Males committed shameless acts with males …
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done… every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice… murder, strife, deceit, craftiness … God-haters … inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless …” [1:26-31]
We see, laid bare from the outset, the heart of the problem: Paul’s God, the judgemental, controlling creator with the serious anger management problem. In my recent book, I named this God, “The God Who Doesn’t Exist”!—in my view, there’s simply no evidence for their existence, either as a creator—we know now that we live in an evolving, not a created world—or as a judge who intervenes directly in human affairs to punish wrongdoers. Paul, and Christians following him to the present day, believing that such a God does exist, is, however, very, very problematic—for obvious reasons.
So, yes, by all means, let’s start again! In New Romans Chapter 1, I take the reader on an evolutionary journey to see if we can find any actual evidence of a God that exists. And, yes, I do find evidence: not for a creator God, obviously, but for a very different God, a Universal Divine Parent.
Circumstantial evidence only, initially. By latest estimates, our universe started from virtually nothing in a Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago; since then, it seems to have evolved under its own steam, gradually developing organized structure on all levels, from the subatomic to the galactic, including, of course, organic life on earth. Increasing structure, organization everywhere you look. It’s not just organic life, but the universe as a whole, that evolves—as if the universe as a whole is itself a sort of organism, growing and evolving—certainly not a giant clockwork machine, as it has historically been thought of. There is a world of difference between organisms and machines: machines are indeed created—by some sort of creator, usually a human—but organisms are not created, they are born, birthed, always, from a pre-existing parent organism[1].
“The birth of the universe”: that’s how scientists actually describe the Big Bang. So, yes, the nature of our evolving universe seems to be perfectly consistent with the possibility of a pre-existing Universal Parent Organism—a Divine Parent God Organism, if you like—who gives birth to the universe in the beginning, and, then, presumably, possibly, continues to nurture it in some way, right to the present day.
Amazing! But, yes, a very long bow indeed to draw, circumstantial evidence only at this stage, no smoking gun obviously, a purely theoretical possibility. But isn’t it a marvellous possibility: so much better than a grumpy old creator—a Divine Parent God, with a much closer, richer relationship in the offing?!
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The evolutionary story goes on. From its humble birth, our little universe/organism grows and evolves, seeming to pretty much take care of itself for a long, long time, no evidence, I don’t think, of the hypothetical Divine Parent God intervening at any point. Until, incredibly, we come along, when they do seem to start intervening.
What in the world am I talking about?! Religion! Humans, uniquely, first among all organic life, develop the amazing cultural phenomenon called “religion”. Suddenly we start believing that all sorts of supernatural beings exist and intervene regularly in our lives: ancestor spirits, evil spirits, angels, gods, even, in many traditions, some sort of ultimate creator God—and even though our understanding of these beings was all over the place, what we held in common was a very definite sense that there was someone or something “out there”, who might be able to help in our hour of need.
Obviously, this is not evidence yet—unless it turned out there was something important the gods or God were able to do for us humans; something we, for some very good reason, couldn’t do for ourselves—that might be evidence for their existence!
And so it has been: religion has actually done something very useful for us, something for which I don’t think there’s any evidence we ever started doing off our own bat, apart from religion: the development of Law – laws which help us cooperate together, selflessly and creatively, in community and society, binding the community together, promoting social cohesion. Rule of Law is an evolutionary imperative: without Law, communities cannot survive, let alone thrive.
Laws which, firstly, teach naturally self-centred individuals to be able to, from time to time, set aside their self-interest in favour of the interests of the group; and secondly, enforce this cooperation by sanctioning lawbreaking. And, yes, such human laws have traditionally been considered to have divine warrant, in most cases to be of actual divine origin: the Mosaic Law, Sharia Law, the customary law and lore of Australian First Nations people, and so on – lots of examples.
Now, is it not obvious that if human Law historically always had some sort of non-human, divine origin, this would not be the sort of thing an omnipotent creator would want to deliver, rather a divine parent? Just the sort of thing, in fact, that a divine parent God, if they existed, would be interested in delivering for their human child organisms.
So: religions have served human communities and societies historically in delivering rule of law, and, through that, the evolutionary imperative of social cohesion. But there is still a significant problem, something that Law on its own can never fully deal with: Sin!
This in fact is what Paul, amazing religious thinker that he is, realizes – and, yes, he believes with all his heart that Jesus is the solution – to the problem of SIN. But here we come to one of the basic flaws in Paul’s understanding. For Paul, and the entire history of religion even to the present day, sin is disobedience to Law, to the God who gives the Law. Paul, a man of his day, limited, blinkered by the old religious worldview, fails to look beneath the surface to discover what sin really is.
In reality, sin—the central problem of human life—is not disobedience to God, rather, natural-born, common or garden, human selfishness, which always threatens the cohesion of human communities and societies, threatens the survival of the whole human race in fact: individuals doing their own thing, acting in their own self-interest, don’t even think about anyone else—the cause of all human problems, everything from little children not playing nicely in the playground, to all-out war and, these days, potentially catastrophic climate change.
Yes, disobedience to Law is the outcome, but natural-born human selfishness is the motivation, and it’s this motivation that Law on its own can’t deal with. Law can only get us as far as what we’d call an “enlightened self-interest”—we cooperate either because we want to avoid the sanctions of the law, or because we believe that in the long term we will, ourselves, benefit from that cooperation—which is certainly a good thing, but it’s still basically a selfish motivation; and if that’s all we ever have, then when it comes to the crunch in our lives in community and society, we will always revert back to our default, natural self-interest[2].
Something more is always needed, therefore, over and above Law, over and above religion, to get human individuals, communities and societies, over the hump from natural-born, selfishness, to some capacity for genuine selflessness—intentional kindness, respect, empathy, cooperation—where we act not with any thought of personal benefit in mind, perhaps even with a clear expectation of personal disbenefit—we act sacrificially, in other words—just the sort of thing that enables communities and societies to really work. The word we’re looking for here is, yes, Metanoia; and this is precisely, at last, where Jesus comes in—but even though Paul knows with an amazing insight that Jesus is somehow the something more that is needed to overcome the shortcomings of the Law, instead he goes his own way, seemingly ignoring Jesus’ teachings about the very thing humanity most urgently needs to undergo: Metanoia, spiritual rebirth or transformation.
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We’ll get to Jesus on Metanoia shortly; here, firstly, in Chapter 3 now, is Paul’s version of how it works:
“But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the Law and the Prophets, the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith.” [3:21-25]
These very powerful verses express the basic formula of salvation. Jesus is now “the Christ”; Paul, through this title, identifying Jesus as the Messiah of Jewish tradition. Not a Messiah to save the people from their Roman oppressors and restore Israel to its former glory, however, rather a Messiah to save the people from God’s condemnation for their sinful disobedience to God’s Law. And this salvation is achieved by Jesus laying down his life as an atoning sacrifice to appease God, who then grants us grace or pardon so we can get back into his good books.
This is the famous Atonement Theology, a marvel of legal reasoning, by which Paul neatly explains how Jesus’ life and death changes everything, how it somehow breaks the stranglehold of sin over human life, giving us a new beginning, propelling us toward an amazing future. Paul’s account is bold, brave, innovative, groundbreaking; but it is essentially false—even if the outcome turns out to be true—again, because it starts from the wrong worldview, the wrong God and the wrong understanding of the nature of human sin in the first place.
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So, again, let’s begin again, and focus on what really matters, what Jesus himself actually taught: Metanoia. It’s the Greek word translated as “repent” or “repentance” when Jesus is recorded as saying it in the Gospel accounts—but literally it refers to much more than just repentance: to undergoing a complete change in our mindset, our whole approach to life; a spiritual rebirth or transformation: from our natural-born state of self-centredness to a newborn state of genuine selflessness.
The Aramaic/Hebrew word Jesus might have actually spoken captures the full richness of Jesus’ intention: “shuv”—”turn around”, “return to God”—connecting Jesus back to the tradition of the old Hebrew prophets, calling the people to repentance, to turn back to God. Jesus doesn’t use the word many times in the Gospels, but when you put it together with all his teachings on selfless living in community—love your enemies as well as your neighbour; give to the poor; turn the other cheek; divine, selfless, agape love; and so on—Metanoia is really the core content of all Jesus’ teaching.
Yes, Metanoia is definitely what we all need, what communities and societies need. But it is problematic, as we’ve seen: Law can’t teach it, so how can we make it happen in our lives, what does it take?
Again and again, Jesus explains what it takes, the only thing that can really get Metanoia going in our lives: faith, belief, trust in … God, “my father in heaven” as Jesus always referred to them—none other, of course, than our old friend the Universal Divine Parent. Faith, belief, trust then opens us up to the something more that is needed, which the Law can’t deliver – spiritual intervention in our lives by that God, through the Spirit—which Paul refers to as Grace—Grace which gives us the real spiritual energy and agency we need to propel us through Metanoia and get us over the hump to true selflessness—which then resolves the shortcoming of the Law that we’ve noted and, ultimately enables human communities and societies, and the whole human race, to not just survive but, hopefully, actually thrive—as problematic as that might well seem at the moment, given all our struggles with social cohesion, war, global warming, AI, and so on!
And here at last is some real evidence, of a divine parent God who intervenes especially in human life, through what Jesus calls the Spirit, to broker Metanoia in human life – real evidence, because you can test it for yourself any day of the week – I commend it to you. Real evidence because, as I think you can also observe, human individuals and groups have, by and large, developed some real facility in selfless cooperation, even if we do still have a long way to go – something Law on its own could never have taught us—so the intervention must be actually happening!
It’s nothing to do with Jesus being the divine Son of God, dying on the cross to atone for our sins to a grumpy, disaffected creator—that is just such an unfortunate and unfruitful mystification. In New Romans I describe Jesus, rather, as a “trailblazer of Metanoia”:
“This is clearly what happened with Jesus: formed completely, naturally human, then the Spirit seems to have immediately gone to work, incarnating selflessness in him, setting him on the path which eventually led to the ultimate act of selflessness, humble submission to execution death on a cross. “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends …”—and in his case he must have had a sense that he was laying down his life for, potentially, all humanity. He might have started out his life as just a man, a mere human being like the rest of us, but by the end of it he was almost certainly becoming more Spirit-filled, more humanly divine—and blazing a pathway to the same for all of us, no doubt!” [New Romans, Chapter 3]
Have there been other trailblazers—mystics such as the Buddha, Lao Tsu, Muhammed, Rumi, Hildegard von Bingen, etc., etc.; or indeed great moral teachers/philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, the stoics, Spinoza, etc., etc.? Probably. In the final analysis, however, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, in the impact of Jesus or any of these possible others on human life and society. My contention—and this is a great discussion topic for another day—is that individuals and groups truly following Jesus’ teachings—often in the face of opposition from the institutional Christian church —have indeed had a profoundly positive impact, through the development of modern science and technology, justice and rule of law, human rights and, of course, democracy.
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So, in summary, now, finally, I’ve given you tonight just a snapshot of how the New Romans Project proceeds: picking up on the things Paul gets right in his letter—his wonderful focus on Grace and Faith—then recasting them through an evolutionary lens, giving what I believe is a more accurate, evidence-based account of what the whole Jesus thing is about – returning to the core of Jesus’ teachings, which Paul, because he has his own pre-conceived religious agenda, effectively disregards. Jesus is already, in my view, post-religion, but Paul goes ahead and constructs a new religion—Christianity—which we now need to start deconstructing—in order to find a new and better version of Jesus—the real Jesus, in fact!
And so the Romans, and New Romans, stories go on: Chapter 6 of New Romans was published just last week, Chapter 7 is due out at the end of this month, and, who knows, it may go all the way to Chapter 16 – stay tuned! I hope you’ve enjoyed the presentation tonight, I’d love to now hear your questions and feedback – so back to you now, ______.
