A Course in Miracles and Christianity: A Dialogue

This little book is practically a classic already: Course in Miracles and Christianity: A Dialogue


A Course in Miracles periodically gives rise to confusion if its use of language is mistaken for Christian. It is not, in the same way that Jesus was not a Christian in the narrow sense, because Christianity was not conceived by him or even during his lifetime, but is an interpretation of him by others who came after him.

A certain amount of confusion has occurred from time to time when statements from the Course get mixed in with Biblical quotes, without clarifying the different context. This books seeks to address this issue, and clear up the confusion by clarifying the profound differences between traditional Christianity and the teachings of the Course. What makes it so valuable, is that the format is one of a dialogue between friends, who obviously mutually respect each other, and undertook this conversation purely to be of service to others, since the evident potential for confusion helps nobody.

However, it would be a mistake to think this book is only for Christians trying to make up their mind about A Course in Miracles. The fact remains that throughout Western culture, we are imbued with the history of Christianity, and the image of Jesus and his death on the cross is ingrained, even if for some that very image, and the presence of suffering in the world, may be part of the reason they rejected the teachings, and became atheists, such as is the case in our day and age with Bart D. Ehrman. The concept of the creator force is the same if we call it God, or Nature, or Evolution. It is the concept where the cause of our life experiences is external to us, and life "happens" to us. Along with this world concept of individual existence and a separate reality, the belief in sacrifice is completely ingrained in the ego's belief system. It is the difference between regarding the universe and the world as an objective, tangible reality, or as "maya," or illusion, a dreamworld caused by the mind, in which we are hoist on our own petard as long as we take that first cause - what the Course calls the "tiny, mad idea" of separation - seriously, but which can also be undone, by learning not to take it seriously any longer, through forgiveness.

A perfect example of taking things seriously is Christianity in all its forms, starting with its redaction of the Bible, and bombarding it into a Holy Book, after selecting just those books that are supportive of the Christian dogma, and discarding, if not burning, the rest. For the purpose of the discussion in this book then, "the Bible" is seen as the instrument of that Christian dogma, and of mostly taking the stories of the Bible quite literally, and granting it a sometimes problematic coherence by regarding it as the Word of God. Outside of the Christian context the Bible could obviously be read in different ways, as is suggested numerous times in the Course itself, a possibility which is also cited in the introduction to this dialogue. Taken at its face value as Christianity does, the Bible is as solid as Newtonian physics, and unreservedly dualistic, granting the physical world reality by declaring that it was created by God. Everything more or less follows from that.

The dialogue in this book represents a very fair and balanced presentation of the differences between this traditional Christian view of the world, which so much permeates the Western world, and the very different view point of A Course in Miracles. The categories which are discussed are basic, and quite conclusive:

• The origin of the world: God created it (Christianity), vs. it's an illusion, a dreamworld projected on the basis of the tiny mad idea of the separation (Course).
• Jesus: Exclusive, and different from us as literally God's only son - the Christ (Christiantiy), or inclusive and same as us, but first to remember Who we really are in truth, and teaching us how we can learn the same thing, in awakening to the Christ Mind where the sonship remembers its oneness. (Course). 
• Crucifixion: Purposely suffered and died sacrificially in an act of vicarious salvation (Christianity), or did not perceive the attack because he knew he was not his body, and did not suffer, but taught only Love and forgiveness (Course);
• Resurrection: Bodily resurrection after the crucifixion (Christiantiy), and the resurrection came before the crucifixion in the form of awakening from the dream and remembering who he was, and doing so before us, so he can now help us, as our older brother and teacher to lead us home (Course). 
• Eucharist: The believers share in Jesus' vicarious sacrifice of his death on the cross, by symbolically partaking of the wine and wafer transmuted into his flesh and blood (Christian), or his followers share in his spirit, celebrating his presence to them in the mind as a demonstration that he did not die, but is alive in them (Course)
• Living in the world: This of course is where the rubber meets the road, and - (very) loosely paraphrasing the book here the alternatives look like:
• Christian style: Jesus, the Word become flesh, God's only son, who suffers and dies for our sins on the cross, and seven days later ascends and goes to Heaven, sitting at the right hand of the Father. He leaves us, the adopted children, with the promise that if we lead good and moral lives in this earth, and present our book with green stamps (good deeds), much like the S&H Green Stamps of old, at the gates, we may join him in Heaven after death, when the tally is made up for a game in which salvation can be won or lost based on making meaningful moral choices of free will. Thus our "stamps" are credits towards a hoped for future redemption. Temptation in this model is the doing of evil deeds on this moral field of experience;
• Course style: Jesus as the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who went before us as our older brother, remembering the way home before we did, who awakened to his true Identity so that he did not suffer when the world crucified his body, but instead only forgave, demonstrating (teaching) only love, for that is what he is and what we are, and who constantly reminds us that in making the same choice with him, and joining with him in the atonement, we are making the choice of hell or heaven in real time.
  The HS Green Stamps (Holy Spirit Green Stamps) in this case are not meritorious deeds collected towards a future stay with Jesus in the balcony seats of Heaven, but rather miracles - a Holy Instant, a momentary view from the balcony seat with Jesus. While we are still too afraid to choose them permanently, the miracle is our experiential confirmation of what it feels like to choose Him as our teacher over the false authority usurped by our jailer, the ego. When at last we become clear that our only fight is with ourselves and not with an angry God who opposes us, and that we only put the jailer in business by continuing to vote him in office, then we are free to learn how every miracle lessens our allegiance until we finally change our vote and join with Jesus in the atonement. We learn to "teach only love" with him, as we accept his love for ourselves. On this path then, our deeds will become more and more loving as we progress in choosing only Jesus as our teacher and guide, but the choices between A, B, or C in the world are seen as only a distraction, and literally a temptation to solve on the physical level what can only be solved by changing our mind ("metanoia" was the N.T. Greek expression for that). Thus in this model the choices are between heaven and hell, freedom and imprisonment, and we experience it as the ability to shift our allegiance from the ego and its separation thoughts, to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, in a joining with Who and What we really are in truth - spirit, and an integral part of the Sonship.
  This life now is a growth path towards spiritual adulthood, by shifting from a teacher of scarcity, slavery and imprisonment, suffering and death (the ego), towards listening to the Voice for God, who is ever present to us within (the promise of the Eucharist), never mind how much we bury him under the worldly drama. He remains the ever present Alternative, the Other Choice. In this model the world simply loses its hold on us, as we choose for freedom. Thus Jesus' living presence to us in the now, is restored to us by our choices, until we fully realize we really are him, for the illusion of a separate free will was the cause of our suffering and pain, and giving that up is no sacrifice at all. Free will then is the freedom to choose the Love of God, in lieu of the incarceration of the ego.
• N.B. This paraphrasing was very liberal indeed - I made up the whole thing about the green stamps, but hopefully it serves as an illustration. I could also add that in the Christian tradition "taking up our cross,"  has been understood as following in Jesus'  footsteps as the suffering servant, in the mold of the passages in Isaiah which describe this. In the Course, "taking up our cross," would refer to taking responsibility for the fact that we chose the ego and crucifixion, simply because we cannot undo the choice until we first take responsibility for it, and recognize we made it in the first place. This willingness to see that we made the wrong choice and would now make another one is what the Course calls the " little willingness," which opens the gate for us to make another choice now.

In short, it becomes very clear in this book why mixing the two models arbitrarily really does not help anybody, because it muddies up either thought system. This little book is extremely helpful in clarifying the issues in a very elegant way. On another level it is a lesson in tolerance, where it simply becomes worthwhile to learn to understand another thought system and understand it for what it is, for that kind of freedom is loving and natural when we have no investment in the world. Whenever we can do these things in such an even handed manner, we will find ourselves where we are able to agree to disagree, and can simply be honestly curious about understanding another, and can enjoy better relations as a result. We learn to live with differences, not in the ego's way of conveniently ignoring inconvenient facts, which trip us up later, but because we have no investment in differences. Norris Clarke certainly represents Christianity in a very appealing way, and amazingly sometimes wanders very close to the Course in his appreciation, but eventually the unbridgeable differences remain.

One thing you will not find here is the perspective of the pre-Christian Jesus tradition, such as the Thomas Gospel, which in recent years has shown us that the traditional Christian point of view is not compatible with the teachings of Jesus either. When properly seen, the study of Thomas and some of the other pre-Christian literature, which was excluded from the Bible - although Thomas was quoted throughout - puts us on an entirely different track, where the Bible falls apart into a collection of books, that we can then appreciate more selectively as literature, and no longer as the monolithic Word of God. Along those lines we would end up placing a lot of "apocryphal" literature on a level with some of the books of the biblical canon, if not sometimes even give them preference as being more likely unadulterated, or closer to the source. In that respect it is worth noting that none of the "Christian" positions and theology as are investigated in this book and represented by Norris Clarke, can trace their origins to the pre-Pauline Jesus literature such as Thomas and Q.

Personally, I have essentially always been inclined to look at the Bible as simply a significant book, and with the respect that is due the holy book of any tradition, but with inconsistent qualities, and particularly have usually ignored Paul in my readings, but I hasten to add that I have also realized more profoundly as I work with the Course how that "Christian"/Newtonian - and would be "Biblical" - model of the world is ingrained in us as part of the ego thought system. So learning to tell the two apart in all their forms is helpful in learning to understand the Course, and learning what it teaches. I have thus come to regard Paul as the exemplar of the ego's strategy of bringing Jesus into the world, or, in the Course's language, bringing the solution to the problem, i.e. trying to fix the world, whereas the Course advocates bringing the problem to the solution, returning to the mind, where Jesus is present to us, and asking for his vision, in lieu of our own mistaken perceptions, as the only possible way out of problems that are of our own making - our own projections.

Again, looking at this purely from a personal standpoint, it boggles my mind when I read Norris Clarke's accounts of what Christians believe, and it really gets kind of funny for me. For most of my life I would have said that I believed in Jesus, but I wasn't a Christian. My understanding of him would have been closer to the symbolic view in ACIM:T-19.IV.C.10, where the birth of Jesus is equated to the beginning of an inner spiritual awakening. As a kid, I was brought up with the notion that the birth of Jesus was just symbolic of the inner events of spiritual awakening. And his baptism in the River Jordan under John the Baptist symbolic of spiritual awakening. By the same token however, until the Course came along in my life, I was never clear on the underlying content of the ego thought system, even though I looked on Christians as a primitive tribe, doomed to die out as they became more and more irrelevant - for in my native Holland people were leaving the churches in droves when I grew up, going from 90% church attendance at the time of my birth to under 10% by the time I emigrated to the USA some 29 years later.

Looking back today, I see how I had taken leave of Christianity, without much clarity about the thought system it stood for or my own subtle investment in it - although I never believed in his dying for our sins, and was taught early on to see that particular theological slight of hand as a sneaky attempt of the ego to have our cake and eat it too, or if you will, to get away with murder. But again, it was not until I met the Course that sorting out the ego thought system began in earnest, and this book is destined to be a classic which untangles the underlying concepts and prevents the confusion that results if people read no further than some superficial resemblances. From that standpoint it is equally helpful to a church pondering if it should include the Course in the liturgy - it should not - to a Course student who is befuddled by the sometimes Christian sounding language - no, this is not your grandfather's Jesus speaking. Regardless of what your faith may be, clarity can only be helpful, and attempts at being inclusive at the price of lost meaning help no one. You can only pour so much water in the wine and still call it wine. After all, " Jeder soll nach seiner fasson selig werden," as the Prussian King Frederick II put it (Everyone should become happy after their own fashion).

Love Does Not Condemn

This is the book. The subtitle spells it out. In a way, if Ken Wapnick has a magnum opus, this is it. It is not for the faint of heart, but others will inhale this material, for it puts our entire Western spiritual/religious framework into a completely new perspective.

More than many other authors, Ken has the profound erudition in the Western intellectual tradition to understand the full scope of the intellectual context of the Course. For some, this may appear to be of passing interest only, but for many others this is very relevant indeed as our study of the Course deepens. Seen at an abstract level, the Course appears to be Advaita Vedanta for the West and with one very important twist, namely that the manifest world is not lent credence at all, as it does in Advaita by seeing it as a Divine play, but rather as a manifestation, a projection in physical form, of the "tiny mad idea" of the separation only. In other words, the world is only what the perceiver, who conceives of himself as separate from the all, perceives, and is a reflection of the erroneous thought process, that takes physical form only because of the separation thought itself, and has no external cause. This turns out to be crucial, as in a way this leaves even Advaita Vedanta with a compromise to dualistic thinking, granting some limited objectivity to the world of form - i.e. the world, although being seen as an illusion, and a silly play, is not our illusion, but is conceived in the mind of the godhead, etc. therefore my changing my mind is not enough. The Course is completely radical in seeing that the only source of the world is illusory itself, being only the tiny misthought, which it refers to as "the tiny mad idea," as if anything at all could be separate from God. And so our only problem is the healing of our own misperception, and what is needed is our willingness to find "another way" of looking at this world. And thus for A Course in Miracles, it's all in the mind, and therein lies the rub. With this little introduction, I want to simply highlight some of the exciting historical explorations in this book.

The terms for the subtitle were taken from a seventeenth century version of the Book of Common Prayer, which says the following: "From fornication, and all other deadly sin; and from all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, Good Lord, deliver us." And anybody who has been around the Jewish or Christian faiths, and their institutionalization of guilt, will immediately appreciate how central these concepts are. At least in the tradition of A Course in Miracles, it is clear how we are to be delivered of these evils, namely by relinquishing our investment in their reality, for as with all demons, they are brought to life and kept alive only by our faith in them, while Jesus teaches only forgiveness of our sins. The explorations of this book really deepen the message of the Course, by demonstrating how Jesus in its pages not only offers correction of certain Biblical passages and concepts, or our interpretation thereof, but how at a much deeper level, it deals with a number of themes peculiar to Western spirituality and religion, and resolves many issues where Western thought has been stuck at various times. And it is important to remember that very much in line with the thinking C.G. Jung expressed on this point, that if we were born in the West, it would probably be helpful to resolve our issues in the context of Western traditions, since we can only resolve the issues on the level where they occur. Jung meant his comments as a counterweight to the fashionable flight to Eastern spiritualities. The title of this book sets the tone immediately in line with the thought system of ACIM, in that it is a teaching of love, and non-judgment, non-condemnation, or, to put it positively, forgiveness. The dedication of the book is worth quoting as well:

To all "Gnostics"--past, present, and to come--who seek to know God through understanding this world's purpose, striving to realize, in the words of the oft-qouted Valentinian formula, that "what liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is and what rebirth" (Excerpta ex Theodoto)

Thus in the typical quaint language of that time this highlights a path of inner inquiry, in a spirit we also find in ACIM, expressed in the second century gnostic teacher Valentinus, whose teachings are known to us only in fairly fragmentary form, but bear close resemblance to the Course in some respects. Ken then balances this statements, which a quote from the Course, which explains the title of the book:

The body was not made by love. Yet love does not condemn it and can use it lovingly, respecting what the son of God has made and using it to save him from illusions.
(A Course in Miracles)

For the rest, while there is no way to truly do this book justice in any reasonable length post, I'll offer an overview of its content with a few hopefully helpful comments. Part I, The Introduction covers the necessary background in Gnosticism, the Platonic traditions, the Early Church, and the gradual development of the antagonism between the church and the gnostics in the second century CE. All of these things are really covered in amazing detail, and their chief importance is again to gain an appreciation of how deeply many of the themes of the Course are a precise counter point to patterns woven into the fabric of the Western tradition, and how the Course properly understood proposes a very sophisticated resolution of many long standing philosophic/religious questions, frequently breaking through all categories. Also interesting is the realization how much e.g. the second century Gnostic teacher Valentinus really prefigured the Course, among other things in the myth stemming from his school saying that Jesus was off on the side laughing under a tree during the crucifixion--emphasizing again the resurrection as a spiritual event, not to mention as something that preceded the crucifixion, as many Gnostics in fact believed. Thus Jesus would have known at the time of the Crucifixion that he was not his body, and that even this violence could not affect who he truly was. Therefore he would not have been the vicarous sacrificial offering to a cruel God the father, but rather a wisdom teacher, demonstrating what he taught by living it, namely that that he was not his body, but spirit. What is clear by the end of this introductory section is that by the end of the 2nd century the free intermingling of "gnostic" ideas within the general budding Christian tradition is ending, with a polarization of the Gnostics, emphasizing inner experience of truth, as the more unruly crowd, who begin to be expelled more and more from the now forming orthodoxy, with the Church emerging as the winner, by every available means including book destruction, etc. In this context the Gnostics became mostly convenient scapegoats, against which the Church could define the right belief (ortho-doxy).

In Section IIa, the book develops the versions of the "creation myth" in Platonism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, showing strands both dualistic and non-dualistic thinking, demonstrating in depth how the more inward focused worlds of Gnostic and Platonic thought intermingled with emerging Christian thought. It is in the 9th chapter, about Jesus, that some of the formational themes in the development of early Christianity get an airing, in particular the principal difference between the Gnostic schools seeing the resurrection as an inner development, and something that preceded the crucifixion, versus the then emerging proto-Christian orthodoxy, which with Paul thinks of the resurrection mostly as a bodily event, which happens only after the crucifixion. It is very helpful for us to understand that these different positions were being widely debated in these early years. Another very important discussion is the one about Docetism, dealing with the question to what extent Jesus was or was not his body, or he only appeared in a body, which includes discussions of such gems as the Acts  of John, where the apostles discuss the differences in their respective experiences of Jesus. Again, exploring all of these precedents would give us a deeper appreciation that the later positions of the Course have deep roots in a long tradition, and address issues that people have struggled with for the last 2000 years, even though for long periods of time certain "orthodox" notions appeared to limit the questioning and the debate. As we can understand with the benefit of hindsight, such periods of quiet meant not that all questions had been answered, just more or less effectively suppressed.

This section concludes with a chapter on "Practical Implications," showing how all these different strains of thinking under the broader umbrella of Christian thought, resulted in widely differing lifestyles, again modeling all of the differing attitudes which we may recognize in students of ACIM to different degrees, if they run off half-cocked with a partial understanding of the Course. To start, it is noteworthy how little currency some dominant points of Christian practice seem to get in Gnostic circles, or at least how different they are in their interpretation, this applies to baptism, anointing. The eucharist barely makes a showing. The theme of The Bridal Chamber as an expression of spiritual "marriage" shows up, which prefigures the notion which in the Course gets the name of the Holy Relationship. This part of the discussion is therefore really about religious rites and symbols, then follows a discussion of moral concepts and behaviors, all resulting from different ways of looking at the world and our position in it, and varying from deliberate libertinism to ascetism to moderation, and some of these are truly interesting, such as the Gnostic libertines who essentially reasoned that since the world was not real, it was their sacred duty to break all the moral norms and act out. Ascetism then is the opposite mistake, instead of acting out because the world is unreal, it reflects a resolve of fighting the world and its hold over us, which of course likewise makes the problem real. Finally there is also a tradition of moderation. Next, in a further exploration of Platonism, Plotinus is perhaps the most interesting, for he focuses on a contemplative life, not on doing good deeds so much as through contemplation to arrive at a position where one cannot help but do good deeds.

The last third of the book addresses the position of A Course in Miracles, providing in fact an integration of all of the strands that were left dangling in these various traditions into a very different and amazingly coherent viewpoint, making the Course an intricate cauda to Western philosophical and spiritual tradition. As addressed at the outset, for the Course it is essential to understand that it's all in the mind, and that the world merely is the stage of our physical experience, but only a projection from the mind, not an objective reality. Thus the idea of separation happens in the mind, and this also makes salvation even possible, for if we made a mistake, and the implication is we can correct it, and the Course's position is that we overcome our futility by realizing we did not commit a sin which is incapable of change, but made a mistake which can be fixed. And the fundamental nature of fixing it is in taking responsibility for having made it, even if we seem clueless about the hows and whys and wherefores. The method of the Course is to experientially put us in touch with the minds ability to change--change our mind, or metanoia in NT Greek--so that it teaches us not mere theory, but a path of experience which helps us reintegrate our real self, instead of the proverbial idol worship which is essentially the world of the ego. For the ego always chases something that is not me, some idol outside of me, and that keeps me completely engaged in the world, oblivious to the fact that I have a mind which is capable of change. The Course says about this: "The secret of salvation is but this, that I am doing this unto myself." (ACIM:T-27.VIII.10:1)

In the Epilogue the book finally summarizes the Course's integration of all these strands of Western spiritual tradition as follows:

A Course in Miracles is such a rewrite of Christian theology (as suggested in a preceding quote from Helmut Koester, reflecting on the impact of Nag Hammadi), in the context of the Neoplatonic and Gnostic traditions, cleansed and expanded by the insights of twentieth century psychology. Thus the old wine of traditional Christianity has been reconstituted in new wineskins, its "old schemes" looked at freshly, and presented anew to eyes and ears receptive to the form of its message. Indeed, the Course can be thought of as the zenith of Western philosophical and religious thought, reconciling the paradox that has virtually imprisoned us in thought systems that reflected our conflicted experience in a world from which we could not truly escape. Holding the key that unlocks this prison door, the Course heals these conflicts of the past, freeing us to build upon its foundation a new beginning, turning the corner on a journey that will carry us ever closer to our God.

That paragraph alone would make it all worthwhile. And while some will not have the patience for this voluminous material, it is important to realize that indeed all these "strands" as I called them before, are somehow present in our spiritual DNA, and that indeed A Course in Miracles is an integration of it all, regardless of whether we are conscious of it or not. The Course certainly is intellectually very profound, but it does not demand that we become scholars of comparative religion, philosophy, psychology, let alone all three. The present book is a tour de force that manages to do all this, and for those of us who are so inclined, it offers endless exciting vistas into the deep structure of the Course's thought system and its roots in Western thought. We end up with a paranoramic, or maybe I should say symphonic, view of Western tradition, in which the Course now forms the cauda which picks up all of the loose ends, and brings it to a rousing conclusion. And finally of course it all ends in a whimper, when we do accept the atonement for ourselves, and realize that all of this was "much ado about nothing." Gratitude to Ken Wapnick as its author, and the pre-eminent teacher of the Course is certainly in order.

Can You Please Choose Somebody Else For A Change?

That is the old joke. Abe Moskowitz comes to heaven and meets God, and he asks Him: "Is it true that the Jews are the chosen people?" And the voice of God booms: "Yes, Mr. Moskowitz, it is true, you are the chosen people!" And Moskowitz says: "Then could you please choose somebody else for a change?"
That, in a word, is the problem of theodicy, and Bart D. Ehrman has just added his proverbial two cents to a long list of explorations of this issue. To phrase it more formally, as Ehrman does in even more detail: If God is the Creator and is Almighty and just, then why would He allow suffering? And Ehrman heaps on the evidence. He could also have referred the reader to the year 2000 special edition of The Economist, where the editorial reminded us that the twentieth century had been the bloodiest on record. Progress anyone?

If you read it with any kind of background in A Course In Miracles, this book has to strike you as a dramatic recap of just why you must slam right into the wall of this question, as long as you think God created the world. The Course's clarification of this point is that God created us as spirit and absolutely one with Him, and that the rest of it is just a nightmare, a delusion, a projection, a mis-creation that emanates from the separation thought, and not at all His Creation. The sole basis of the seeming reality of the world lies in the one impossible speculation: What if I were separate? What if, indeed.

The results are quite absurd, as Ehrman duly points out by making the world good and real and treating us to endless descriptions of suffering from the Bible and from history, as well as his own personal experience. However, under the Course's approach, that experience of suffering is just our frenzied imagination run amok with our impossible thoughts, the reality of which has no firm foundation except in our stubborn belief that would make it so. A mind is a powerful thing, and that is why in the end there is hope, for if we can make a mistake, we can also fix it, by getting the right guidance and learning that we are not a helpless victim at all. But as with Ehrman, the defense--let's blame somebody else--makes sense from a psychological standpoint. At the beginning of the story when the idea is fresh, we only have God to blame. Later, when we carry it to logical extremes and have the choice of an unlimited number of hapless individuals mirroring the same thought ad infinitum, we can and we do blame everybody and their neighbor.

Meanwhile, as to studying the Bible, Ehrman's story is fascinating. For he lost his fundamentalism a long time ago, as he became a serious Bible scholar, and the wonderful thing is that he has shared his voyage of discovery with us, starting with his evolution from fundamentalism towards a more critical attitude. But his current book describes his grappling with the very dualistic biblical God, Whom again, as Course students, we would look upon for the most part as an expression of the ego - He has His good days and His bad days, and beware of the bad days! Hence, while the author has moved from his earlier fundamentalist literalism about the language, the form of the Bible, towards greater freedom, to appreciate that neither the form of it nor the beliefs it reflects are any kind of a coherent whole, he is still stuck in literalism about the content of the book on another level, and hence he has now slammed solidly into the wall that is known as theodicy, and he has sent us his accident report. I for one enjoy his willingness to do an honest self-examination, and to evolve his position, not to mention the liberal sharing of his personal development with his readers. It is a wakeup call.

What is curious is that Ehrman, who does such a marvelous job in his book Lost Christianities, by documenting how early Christianity was not at all the coherent whole that people would like to believe it was, here sticks to a fairly rigid regimen of reading of the Bible and never once even suspects that it can also be read on another level. Evidently, he is familiar with some gnostic literature, but it does not seem to occur to him that some of the gnostic speculation that the God of Genesis, who created the world, must be an inferior sort of a God and not the true God, should perhaps be entertained seriously. Given how he is evidently bothered by the Bible, one might hope he would at least entertain such a possibility ever so briefly, after all he describes brilliantly how apocalypticism was an ancient attempt to deal with theodicy. The only reason the gnostics ever came up with that idea in the first place, is that, from Jesus, they did understand God to be a loving God, not to mention that His Kingdom was not of this earth, so why would He create one in the first place? It did a lot for them in looking at the problems of evil and suffering differently.
Having said that, if one were to read Ehrman's exploration with a different mindset, as the Course might suggest to us, we might understand that, while some themes in the Bible may contain profound spiritual truths, other parts reflect the ego's dualistic experience of God, which sometimes shows up as good God, vs. angry God, and other times as God vs. the Devil. And thus it becomes very clear and instructive just how large parts of the Bible portray the ego's pathological killer God and not at all the loving Father Whom Jesus represents in the New Testament. And yet we do feel spoken to, for some part of us knows, that we who are reading this are the chosen people, but we do not realize how and why the dualism and the hell and damnation--not to mention the need to "fear God"--are the projection of our own choice of the separation. After all, in a symbolic sense, Israel is nothing else but the Sonship in the separation, lost in exile in a world which is not our home, and in terror of a vengeful God who is merely the projection of our attack on Heaven and a completely logical outflow of preferring the separation.
Similarly, the frequent theme of the "adulterous generation" really does ring true because deep down we know our own faithlessness to who and what we really are. And unless we turn to the Internal Teacher of the Course, who represents to us our Loving Father and the personification of our Sonship to us (no one comes to the Father except through him!), and who thus truly is the truth, the way, and the life. In the biblical representation there rarely is relief from the fear, except in the examples of forgiveness and various assertions in the teaching of Jesus. Paul in the New Testament quickly corrects that and reverts back to fire and brimstone whenever he can. So also the stories of Baal worship in the Old Testament merely symbolize how the ego leads us into the dominion of oppressive gods, but the vengeance of the one God is, again, only our projection, of our guilt over our own preference.

There are many other elements which should make us think that the material is symbolic, not literal. There is the issue of the 12 tribes and the 12 apostles, and the twelve in terms of the Zodiac simply represent "all of us," in the sense that it represents all the possibilities. What could be more clearly symbolic! There are many more connections where that came from. There is also the symbolism of many names, which equally should tip us off that: 1) these are not histories--about someone else in some other time--these are myths that want to represent a truth to us now, in the sense of the typical fairy tale opening, "Once up on a time," and 2) the value of the stories lies in the themes they represent, not in the specifics of the story. The ego always obfuscates matters by confusing the staging for the plot. Again, from the Course's standpoint, once we understand how it is an ego-ploy to "accuse" God of creating the world, let alone humans, Ehrman's cry, "In the Bible, aren't humans made in the image of God?" (page 189) would be solved.

Ehrman in his book remains stuck in the literalist view and does not entertain the symbolic view, which opens up if we get above the battlefield and look at our perceptions with Jesus and begin to understand the dynamics of projection and the fact that, in the world (where we think we are), it all comes to us in parables. One wonders why generations of people stay stuck in this view of the Bible, even though Jesus is repeatedly quoted as saying, that if we do not look at it with him, it all comes to us in parables, but if we join with him, he will explain it all to us. (c.f. Mk. 4:34). Once we do move in this direction though, even the most fearful parts of the Bible could make good reading as a way of appreciating the insanity of the ego.
In the discussion of apocalyptic thought some of the psychological understanding which the Course offers could again clarify a lot. It was not just some arbitrary literary "invention" to entertain speculative thinking about the end of times, rather, it is a fundamental aspect of the ego's "dynamics" which seeks to rob us of the present with guilt over the past and fear of the future, so that, to paraphrase the Course, at no point is individuality actually real at all (c.f. ACIM:T-2.I.2:1-2,  T-6.V.A.2, T-18.VII.3:1). On the whole the discussion of apocalyptic thinking makes clear also what the results are of the level confusion, which reduces the coming of the Kingdom to an event in linear time, which again is only a projection of the ego's fears, and an anthropomorphic distortion of what Jesus said, as would also be clear by a juxtaposition of some of the Thomas sayings, where Jesus makes it very clear that the Kingdom is here now, except we don't see it yet, which again chimes in beautifully with the Course's notion of "a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed" (ACIM:T-8.VI.9:7). In the course of all this we can only come to appreciate more deeply what a powerful job Christianity did in completely obliterating abstract thinking, which has been so powerfully present in other traditions such as Hinduism (Advaita Vedanta) and Buddhism, and when some gnostics took a stab at it, it was run out of town as heresy. Curiously, even in the presence of the world view of quantum mechanics, and modern psychology, quite aside from the Course, this book stops at observing the patent impossibility of looking at God and the Bible in the Christian way.

On another level, however, the larger picture of the Bible does make sense, if we appreciate it on a more symbolic level, i.e. as parables. As Adam, we do choose duality and fall asleep--and, as the Course says, "nowhere does it refer to him waking up..." (ACIM:T-2.I.3:6). The waking-up part only comes with Jesus who asks us to follow him to His Kingdom not of this (dream!)- world. But, for the most part, he was badly misunderstood, and Paul quickly dragged him back down to "reality," making it seem as though he was to come to us, as in Paul's understanding of the Second Coming, instead of us going to him, which is what he asked. Paul in effect left him nailed to the cross, and later abandoning us by going to Heaven by himself. And emergent Christianity sold us on the idea that he was late coming back, so that, as adopted sons, for us there is in the meantime little else to do but to feel guilty, try to be good little Christians, and hope for the best, unless, that is, there might be another way of looking at this picture.
On the whole this aspect of the book shows clearly how Ehrman still thinks like a Christian, even as he protests that he longer can be a Christian, for again and again he quotes the contradictions in the Bible, which might go away, if one seriously allowed a critical thinking of the Bible, in which it turns out to be a seriously flawed patchwork of thought, stories and ideas about man's relationship with God, which coalesced together as a book through a highly capricious set of historical circumstances, so why stick to reading it as if it was a consistent whole? In particular the increasing dualism in  "quotations" (or should we just say "attributions")  of Jesus,  might be resolved once we understand how the Jesus of Thomas was a non-dualist, and the Jesus of the Pauline world of Christianity was a dualist and a literalist--or is that really Paul we are talking about? And along those same lines it makes sense that Ehrman spends a lot of time on Paul's reasoning as to why the resurrection was a bodily, and not a spiritual event. This is the same Ehrman, who unlike many others, dismisses the Thomas gospel, where Jesus sounds so very different from his Pauline incarnation in the canonical gospels, as a fraud instead of letting it open his eyes as to why Jesus really did teach something very different  before being edited by Paul. In other words, as long as we dogmatically assume the Pauline redaction of Jesus as a given, we never will be open to what Jesus said before Paul came along, even though it makes historical sense to do so, since "Paul" only came along after Jesus had already died, and said all that we have been told about him saying, and the question of who is saying it deserves more attention.

One final example of Ehrman's being stuck in Christianity, albeit a non-Christian Christianity, is his treatment of Revelation, in which he points out that the author of the book clearly was concerned not with prognosticating our future, but with his own imminent expectation of doom. If the book were thus read psychologically, it is a graphic example of the perennial ego-principle of the expectation of doom as the necessary corollary to the assumption of individual existence, namely that death eventually proves the seeming reality of such  unreal existence. So psychologically death is the ego's trump card, and that is the underlying appeal of Revelation for all ages. It portrays the ego's apocalyptic expectations. So that, when, on the basis of his literalistic (dare I say "Christian"?) reading he says, "Moreover, the fervent expectation that we must be living at the end of time has proved time after time--every time--to be wrong,"  in fact when this apocalyptic dynamic is properly understood as a projection that results from the basic ego-dynamic, it should be evident that it is a perfect expression of the underlying ego fear, that its game is up, it is living on borrowed time--because it is!
On the whole, then, besides the fact that I've enjoyed Ehrman's recounting of his journey thus far, I can only hope for his sake that he does not stay in sack and ashcloth at the wailing wall, which is this book. Just as with Job's friends, the ego's witnesses only reflect back to us the reality of our suffering and the injustice that is being done to us, not to mention their judgment of us, and unless and until we get tired of the ego's dirge (ACIM:P-2.VI.1:5), our "friends" won't quit talking to us (for that's what we have them for). And not until they finally fall silent will we even begin to hear the Voice for God, symbolized in the book of Job by " Elihu"  (Job's fourth friend, whose name meant "This one is my God"), and who shows up at the end of the story, at which point Job begins to hear the Voice of God. But we won't get tired of the ego's dirge (ACIM:P-2.VI.1:5) until we look at it with Jesus, for only his love and forgiveness takes the sting out of it, and in the end drains the air out of the ego's balloon, so that it can "...fade into the nothingness from which it came..." (ACIM:M-13.1:2).
Some aspects of the book are quite funny and illustrative of what the Course teaches us about denial, e.g. when the author describes his experiences in social situations, when he tells people he's writing a book about suffering and they fall silent. His description of the reactions is priceless, and... no surprise! Clear proof that the ego does not want us to look at it honestly! In the end, though, his conclusion is that the best we can do is to make the world a better place, so welcome to the New Age. Self-examination, unpopular ever since Socrates was put to death for promoting it, has been unpopular in Western tradition. For those who are otherwise inclined, there is the Course, and the Work (by Byron Katie), pointing in the other direction, towards taking responsibility for our projections, and changing ourselves, which, while it is not a trivial task, is infinitely easier than changing everyone else, let alone the whole world. Jesus had a cute saying that we could not hope to help our brother get the splinter out of his eye, lest we remove the moat out of our own eye first...

One interesting little detail of this book is that Ehrman seems to subscribe to a chronology in which Mark was composed after Paul started to write, which I tend not to believe, but having said that, there unquestioningly are some very Pauline lines in Mark, though to me it seems they are not as much an integral part of the story as Ehrman suggests. Depending on how you read those passages, it seems to me that those Pauline interpretations, which theologize the events, could easily be lifted out without compromising the story.

Postscript: Since I posted this note, I went to hear Bart Ehrman speak at St. Bart's in Manhattan, at their Center for Religious Inquiry. He signed my copy of the book. In a brief conversation I suggested to him that he had joined the club of Thomas Jefferson, and that the "Jefferson Bible" really was his Bible at this point, considering that Jefferson considered himself a materialist, but had high regard for Jesus as a teacher of morality. Clearly he had not thought of that, but upon a brief moment of reflection he could not help but agree. Not a bad club to belong to, I guess.
(Note the discussion of the biblical Job in this light is based on the article " Beproeving," [Eng. " Temptation"], by J. W. Kaiser, in the bundle Mysterien van Jezus in ons Leven, Synthese, The Hague, Holland).