The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind

[Yoder777]

I am reading this book and it's very interesting so far:

Book Review
The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind
Cynthia Bourgeault
Spirituality & Practice: Book Review: The Wisdom Jesus, by Cynthia Bourgeault

In the first chapter, she says that to understand the message of Jesus, we need to go back to before his death and resurrection, to what drew the apostles to him in the first place. What made Jesus different from the conventional authorities is that he was a wisdom teacher, preaching the way of spiritual wholeness.

In the second chapter, she says that "orthodoxy" should be understood as "right praise" rather than "right belief," since the original Greek word has both meanings. To be orthodox is to praise God with our daily lives. To be orthodox is to put on the mind of Christ, a common theme in Paul's letters.

It's true that for the better part of the past sixteen hundred years Christianity has put a lot more emphasis on the things we know about Jesus. In the last chapter, I spoke about how the word "orthodox" has come to be interpreted as having the correct beliefs. Along with the overt requirement here (to learn what these beliefs are and agree with them) comes also a subliminal message: that the proper way to relate to Jesus is through a series of beliefs. In fundamentalist Christianity this message tends to get even more accentuated, to the point where faith essentially appears to be a matter of signing on the dotted lines to a series of creedal statements. Belief in Jesus is indistinguishable from belief about him.

But this certainly isn't how it was done in the early church - nor can it ever be done this way if what we are really seeking is to come into a living relationship with this wisdom master. Jim Marion's book returns us to the right ballpark - to the central challenge that Christianity ought to be handing us. Indeed, how do we put on the mind of Christ? How do we see through his eyes? How do we feel through his heart? How do we learn to respond to the world with that same wholeness and healing love? That's what Christian orthodoxy really is all about. It's not about right belief; it's about right practice.
The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart ... - Google Books

She interprets the word "repentance" according to its original Greek meaning, "to go beyond the mind," the path of reaching beyond our conventional wisdom into the mind of Christ. When Jesus claims "I and the Father are one," he is speaking of a unity with God not exclusive to himself, but open to all human beings.

Bourgeault takes the Gospel narratives mostly for granted, while delving deeper into their inner spiritual meaning than a rigid literalism would allow. What emerges is the Christ who attracts us even as he baffles our everyday perception. "The Kingdom of God is within you," if only we remove our blinders to see it.

When we see Jesus as a teacher of spiritual enlightenment, his death and resurrection take on a whole new meaning. It means much more than believing in doctrines now for the sake of heaven later. In dying and rising, Jesus lights the path in which we die to our old selves and are reborn in Christ.

In the decades following the death of Jesus, St. Paul wrote, in the Letter to the Ephesians, what is probably the central injunction of Christianity: “You must therefore put on the mind of Christ Jesus.” This verse—frequently quoted and diversely interpreted—is incredibly enlightening when viewed from an integral altitude...

To understand St. Paul’s statement, then, one can take up the injunction of the Church, which for fifteen centuries passed down a rich collection of contemplative practices that lead precisely to “putting on the mind of Christ.” Unfortunately—and for reasons that become clear from an integral altitude—these practices were, for the most part, discarded in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, which threw out the mystical baby with the mythical bathwater. It is only in our time, and through the heroic work of teachers such as Father Thomas Keating, Brother David Steindl-Rast, and Jim, that the mystical tradition is being rediscovered on a large scale.

Jim points to two recent books that, taken together, demonstrate where the Christian tradition finds itself. Both books seek to answer the question: who is Jesus? The first, Bishop John Shelby Spong’s Jesus for the Non-Religious, relentlessly demythologizes Jesus to the point that he ends up looking, quite simply, like a really great guy. But this approach, which strips Jesus of any sense of divinity, likewise strips his followers of the means by which to “put on the Mind of Christ.”

In contrast, Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth makes use of considerable biblical scholarship to try to answer the same question. But the divinity of his Jesus is emphasized to the point that it’s hard to find anything human in him, as though God assumed human nature like putting on a suit of clothes. And thus the dichotomy: if Jesus is God and we are not, how can we possibly put on His Mind?

The ancient Christian tradition stresses that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. He was not simply a really great guy; nor was he simply God walking around on earth for a time. Father Thomas speaks of Jesus on the Cross, stretched out between Heaven and Earth, as a profound symbol of the wedding together, in one Person, of all of evolution—matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit—leading the way for us all to do the same. This process of divinization, as Eastern Christian traditions put it, is beautifully worded in the liturgical prayer: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.” Integral spirituality likewise exhorts us to be fully human (developing our abilities to take the widest and highest possible perspectives) and fully divine (moving into states of an ever-deepening oneness with Spirit). Perhaps we too will die to the egoic self-contraction we somehow believe ourselves to be. And perhaps we too will awaken and leave behind “the empty tomb….”
The Mind of Christ | Integral Life