“Someone once had a terribly beautiful thing to say about Jesus. This person wasn’t even Christian. He said, ‘The lovely thing about Jesus was that he was so at home with sinners, because he understood that he wasn’t one bit better than they were.’” - Anthony de Mello
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At first glance, you may fear that a Christian apologist has infiltrated the Spiritual Naturalist forum and is seeking to convert parts of the flock that have gone astray. I can assure you, this is not the case. I consider myself a solidly secular naturalist of the same ilk as the cosmologist Carl Sagan, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and “earthiest” Edward Abbey. I am here to encourage openness and curiosity, to what I have experienced as an already open and curious community, regarding a man whom I dearly regard as a great teacher of wisdom. To put it plainly, I intend to share my perspective and experience with the teacher known as Jesus of Nazareth, whom I consider one of the wisest and most beautiful human beings to walk this earth.
Below, I hope to provide an understanding of his teachings that aligns with a naturalist perspective without diminishing the potency of his message. If successful, you too will have some understanding of why his teachings are referred to as the “Good News.”
Reframing Jesus for the Naturalist
Firstly, I think it is helpful as part of this reframing process to address the religious language that many of us may find off-putting due to the exaggerated and supernatural additions made to Jesus’s teachings by most Christian denominations. Most importantly, let us de-romanize the teacher’s name, Jesus, and from here onward refer to him by his proper Aramaic name, Yeshua. As we proceed, I will be reframing and translating several familiar teachings to language that is both in line with Yeshua's core message and clarifying to naturalists.
Like many, I first encountered Yeshua’s teaching in the pews of my childhood church. Raised Lutheran, I found Protestant Christianity both warm and stuffy. There I was imparted miraculous stories, followed rote rituals, and felt an expectation to believe in a reality I found unlike the world of my everyday life. I now find this, and much of Christianity as I had known it, completely antithetical to the teaching of Yeshua, who I believe would have found the same experiences lacking in the vitality of what he called true life. Upon reading the Gospels, you too may relate to his disappointment in institutional religion, inauthentic apologists, and out-of-touch scholars.
For the sake of brevity, we will primarily be looking at Yeshua’s core teaching, which is 1) to love God and 2) to love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:30-3). The latter, Yeshua notes, is derived from the former “since the same God is within him” (Tolstoy, 118). For Yeshua, to love God is to love your neighbor and vice versa. My neighbor’s yard sign succinctly summarizes this teaching, “Love God, Love People. It’s simple.” The rest of Yeshua’s instructions (regrettably translated as commandments in most versions) can be derived from the first two and are as follows: do not be angry, do not take oaths, do not resist evil, and love your enemy (Matthew 5:21-48). The sum of these teachings is often reverently referred to as the Sermon on the Mount.
These teachings are as relevant and urgent in the time of Yeshua’s lifetime within Roman-occupied Palestine as they are in today’s globalized world. To see why this is the case, we will need to do further reframing of some mythic/religious language to that of a naturalist.
Loving Reality
The celebrated religious naturalist Fr. Michael Dowd, in his book “Thank God for Evolution,” provides a naturalistic and inspiring understanding of Yeshua’s first instruction: to love God. For Dowd, “God” is a personification of what he terms Inescapable Reality. In the same way Uncle Sam is a personification of the United States government, to incite God is to personify the whole of Reality. God, or Reality, is inescapable because, as the author Phillip K. Dick notes, “when you stop believing in it, [Reality] doesn't go away.” The proverbial apple will fall on your head whether you believe in gravity or not.
From this perspective, God is Reality, Nature, or the Universe itself, personified to make the abstract more relatable. That is, the name “God” is a way of orienting oneself towards Reality to foster a personal relationship with it. For Yeshua, to love (in Greek, agape) is to care, serve, and trust unconditionally. To let Reality be as it is. For the naturalist, to love God is to care for, trust and accept Reality in all of its manifest forms. Likewise, to care for and trust our neighbor, whom Yeshua also calls our siblings, is a tangible way of loving Reality, because we are all part and parcel of the same universe.
Yeshua’s message contains within it a perennial insight echoed across the wisdom traditions of the world: that it is wise to do unto others as you would have done unto yourself. This is not just a pithy adage; it’s an insight verified by the ecological, biological, and cosmological evidence of modern science. This proclamation of Inescapable Reality (or God) acknowledges that we are all one with the same Source. We are all made of matter, atoms, carbon, and energy. We are all governed by the same physical laws. We are interdependent. As Yeshua puts it, "whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:40).
Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself
Given this position, the other five instructions from his Sermon on the Mount seem readily deducible. Why be angry with others when they are the same basic “star-stuff” as you? What else is worthy of our oaths than Reality, or Truth, itself? It’s understandable that when hurt is met with hurt, it only further harms our universal self. Therefore, to “turn the other cheek” is a nonverbal acknowledgment of our kinship with those who, unwilling to see this relationship, seek to harm us. We are wise to love our enemy because they are, in a fundamental sense, ourselves. We have been conditioned by culture from an early age to see the imaginary separation between us, veiling our true inter-dependence.
One common form of conditioning is the encouragement of unwise goals. Yeshua advises not to “store up your treasures on earth, [but to] store up your treasures in the sky, where moths and rust don’t ruin them, and robbers break in and steal” (Matthew 6:19-20). Here he highlights the impermanence of wealth and status. Yeshua notes how we unreasonably invest our care and trust into things which fade away, or that can be taken. Doing so unknowingly causes us to perceive our neighbors as thieves and competitors rather than our brethren.
As a result, we miss the beauty and community that is right in front of our eyes. He continues in Matthew 6:22, “The eye is the body’s lamp; if your eye is sound, your whole body will be light. But if your eye is bad, the whole body will be in darkness.” He tries to show us how our understanding of the world is colored by our perceptions, which results in a fractured relationship with the interwoven Reality around and within us. Instead, Yeshua teaches to put our care and trust into Reality and community. When we do, we avoid fruitless pursuits and “will be like a wise man who builds his home on stone” (Matthew 7:24).
The Kingdom of Heaven is Within
In this light, we can better understand what Yeshua means when he describes the Kingdom of Heaven. In Ruben’s translation, she notes that the literal Greek translation for “heaven” is “sky.” I’ll admit, when I first read “kingdom of the sky,” I was put off, as it conjured images of Mount Olympus, with God sitting on a throne in the clouds. However, after further consideration, “sky” seems a perfect translation for the naturalist. The sky is open, radiant, and contains the vastness of the Cosmos. When Yeshua urges us to “Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” he is sharing an accepted ontological fact; that we cut from the same cloth as the rest of the cosmos. As Henry David Thoreau acknowledges, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
Regrettably, the word “repent” is the common mistranslation of the Greek “metanoia”, meaning to change one’s mind. In Yeshua’s time and place, the mind was thought to be located in the heart. The more accurate translation “Change your heart, the Cosmos is within you” reveals a radically different message than the traditional rendition. What Yeshua is pleading is to change our perspective and accept our unity with Reality, ultimately to free us from unnecessary suffering. This is salve-ation, in Greek soteria, to heal or make whole. Yeshua says that whether you encounter a friend or enemy, Christian or atheist, rock or antelope, it is imperative to understand that we all share the same Source, which he refers to lovingly as his Father.
Our current ecological and social predicament demonstrates what happens when we don’t follow Yeshua’s wise counsel; by failing to live in right relationship with Reality, and by extension with each other, we have perpetuated all sorts of unnecessary suffering on a planetary scale. By hoarding wealth and ignoring Inescapable Reality, we have profoundly harmed our true brothers and sisters. Most notably our sister Earth, the lilies in the field, birds in the trees, and the numerous non-human siblings with whom we share our home. We have mistaken ourselves for God, not realizing we are only a part of Nature, not its Lord. This is the delusion Yeshua hoped to awaken us from.
Conclusion
From a naturalistic perspective, it is understandable to see why Yeshua’s teachings are referred to as the Good News. It is Good in the sense that it is true, verified today by the natural sciences with an overwhelming amount of evidence confirming we are of the universal community, not above or separate from it. These teachings can be called News because they are as fresh and relevant as the time they were first delivered. Unfortunately, we still don’t seem to be paying it much attention. This is partly due to the vested interests of exclusionary power, including religion, industry, and politics, attempting to distract from this news altogether. It’s pertinent to remember that these same interests literally crucified Yeshua for daring to speak this Good News openly in the first place!
I hope you can understand why I found it relevant to re-share this Good News with you. I hope you can see the beauty in the life of this gentle teacher whose wisdom points to our inherent worth as integral fabric in the great cosmic tapestry. What makes Yeshua remarkable is that he didn’t just teach this Good News; he embodied it by caring for his most vulnerable neighbors who were often sick, poor, and rejected by society.
I invite you, with your naturalist lenses intact, to revisit Yeshua’s teachings. There is much to be gained from its message of love, forgiveness, hope, and community.
References:
Dick, P. K. (1985). I hope I shall arrive soon. Doubleday.
Dowd, M. (2009). Thank god for evolution: how the marriage of science and religion will transform your life and our world. First Plume
Ruden, S. (Trans.). (2021). The gospels: A new translation. Modern Library.
Tolstoy, L. (2011). The gospel in brief: The life of Jesus (D. Condren, Trans.). Harper Perennial.
Footnotes:
1. While seeing bible verses noted may seem strange in a SN article, it seems the best way to understand these teachings is to use Yeshua’s own (reported) words which I will be citing from two translations of the Gospels. The two translations I will be using, and highly recommend to any curious naturalists, is “The Gospel in Brief” by Leo Tolstoy and “The Gospels” as translated by Sarah Ruden (interesting both a Quaker and reputable scholar of ancient texts.)
2. This smacks of the Stoic counsel to live in accordance with nature, or amor fati.
3. Ruben includes a thorough glossary of terms in her translation, explaining her translations from the original Greek and some of the reasoning behind it.
*This article was originally posted on the Spiritual Naturalist Society and can be found here.