Another Road

Jim Burklo has a heart for people. In his book, Open Christianity: Home by Another Road, he opens his arms wide to the hearts of humanity. His passion for the hurting, the confused, and the homeless (in physical and spiritual terms) really comes through, especially in the last few chapters. As campus minister for Stanford University, minister of a local Christian congregation, and founder and director of the Urban Ministry of Palo Alto, Burklo has had ample opportunity to learn how to love people. His chapters on humility, social activism, justice, and simplicity bring home his desire for communities in which people care for and are taken care of by each other.

Burklo is a "progressive Christian." That is, he believes, with Vaclav Havel, that "the same basic message [is] at the core of most religions and cultures throughout history: people should revere God as a phenomenon that transcends them; they should revere one another; and they should not harm their fellow humans" (quote within a quote from page 82).

Open Christianity describes the theological underpinnings of this progressive Christianity, and argues that mainstream Christianity has gone astray in its theological and dogmatic assertions. In order to accommodate his theology in the reading of Christian scriptures, Burklo re-interprets the gospels' narrative of Jesus. To Burklo, Jesus was not unique in his divinity; Jesus was unique in uniting his human self with his "divine Self." This becomes Burklo's ultimate goal for all of us. He reinterprets the gospel of John's "no one comes to the Father except through me" to mean "no one comes to God except through encountering God within him- or herself."

Burklo rails against the idea that one must believe something to be Christian. Instead, he centers the Christian life on an experience of God, "knowing God," which happens only through one's own inner discernement. This experience of God is possible for all of us individually, because we all comprise our selves and divine Selves. As such, Burklo makes God more immanent and, contrary to his quoting of Havel, less transcendant. His insistence on a God who can be experienced at will by every person relieves us of the burden of trust, of believing in a God who is outside our realm of experience.

The power of Burklo's conception of God lies not so much in what he asserts by affirmation, but in what he asserts by omission. First, Burklo's God is not a person. Because God is a Self to humanity in Burklo's thinking, God is absorbed into humanity. Inasmuch as God may be transcendant--not human--God is a "principle or process" which humans experience. God does not have an identity to which I can relate as an Other. In this--as with many other things--Burklo departs from central themes storied in Christian scripture.

Burklo's second omission declares that God is not active. God is a passive entity which, being within the Self, has no prerogative to act. In the self-realization of Burklovian Christianity, the self does all the work, the creating, and the realizing. This may feel liberating for most people, but it relies upon making oneself into god, the primary problem against which Jesus and all the scriptures warn.

Without person-hood or power, Burklo's God is neither threat nor comfort. God is a take-it-or-leave-it experience, as passive and static as the Joshua Tree National Monument. One could live as fulfilling a life without visiting the Monument as one might spending every day there. These two omissions make all the difference to me, being a follower of Yahweh, the god who redeems (in power) and engages me in love as a genuine other (as a person). These two attributes of God--whether or not one articulates them in strictly orthodox terms--underpin the value of Jesus and his ministry.

For the spiritual quest through the desert of human life, Open Christianity seeks to lovingly discard the doctrinal baggage which will exhaust us before the journey's end. In the process, however, it has cast away also the food and water for the journey.

~ emrys