Sea of Faith Christchurch Group

At our next meeting, on Friday 9 October, those who were at conference will report back to us. There’s been quite a lot of discussion in Sea of Faith circles recently about the Jesus Seminar and its research into what we can reliably know about the historical Jesus, and a well-publicised book by David Boulton giving an overview of the scholarly study of Jesus. It will be interesting to hear what conference presented on these topics. I’ve just been translating the following passage from Drewermann, which might help to warm you up to the theme:

It is a quite simple fact, the discovery of which has a disastrous effect on theological systems, that the Buddha naturally was not a “Buddhist,” Jesus was not a “Christian” and Mohammed was not a “Mohammedan.”  The “founders” of world religions did not want to “found” a new religion, but to deepen and renew in its origin the existing religiosity. It can indeed no longer be a matter of divinizing the founders of a religion and celebrating them in ritualized patterns of liturgical actions. From now on it will only be a matter of acquiring for oneself the experiences out of which those great role models lived.