Roberta Grimes

Reinventing Christianity

Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 13, 2024 • 12 Comments
Jesus, Understanding Reality

Dear One, the world is waiting for the sunrise.
Every rose is covered with dew.
The thrush on high his sleepy mate is calling,
And my heart is calling you.

 Dear Heart, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rosebud is heavy with dew!
And while the thrush his sleepy mate is calling,
In My Heart is calling You!
– Gene Lockhart (1891-1957) & Ernest Seitz (1892-1978), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1918)

When even some secular publications are now saying that the bodily Resurrection of Jesus is the single most important event in all of human history, then perhaps we ought to reconsider whether we really should be insisting on altogether ditching the terms “Christian” and “Christianity.” I was sure that Jesus would be better off without those terms. But, is that really true? Perhaps in trying to give up all His religious designations, we might be acting too hastily. And, yes, I wince a bit as I write these words! Just the thought of holding on to terms that have been connected to so much pain in the world over the past seventeen hundred years still gives me pause. It feels almost as if we are feeling a sudden new fondness for things like swastikas perhaps, or giant statues of the brutal god Moloch, to whom they sacrificed children. But our problem is, my beloved friends, that the historical Jesus is so deeply bound up in the Christian religion that the Romans invented hundreds of years after Jesus’s bodily death and His Resurrection. And the Romans connected their new religion so tightly to Jesus’s name, and He has been thereby caught up in the religion from its earliest beginnings. Christianity as a religion is false in its dogmas, and its beliefs are mostly fear-based and false, all created to support the malevolent powers of ancient and corrupt Roman rulers long past. But Jesus and the Godhead from which He came are indisputably genuine and true, and they are based in nothing but the greatest love from ever since their own beginnings! So, what can we do with this conundrum now?

For the longest time, it seemed that we simply could separate Jesus from the Roman religion and then let that false Christianity die. And so indeed it is dying now, and it is dying of its own dead weight. According to a September 2022 Pew study, people identifying as Christians have decreased from 90% of the U.S. population in 1972 to 64% in 2020. And in the aftermath of the COVID crisis, that number now is even lower. Those who today religiously identify as “nones” comprise roughly 30% of the U.S. population. But Christianity had made Jesus so completely its symbol from its inception that it is becoming ever-increasingly clear to us that Jesus has all along been even bigger in people’s minds than the religion itself ever could have been.

Just in the past couple of decades, as Christianity has continued to fade, Jesus has begun to do on His own schedule what always was going to be essential if He was not going to go down with the foundering Christian ship. Jesus’s plan has for a long time been to create an individual image for Himself in modern people’s minds with a couple of recent movies, and with “The Chosen” TV show, and also with the college-based revivals that have been happening at some southern schools during these recent springs. All of this has long been planned and is being orchestrated by Jesus Himself. Lately Thomas has made it clear to me that Jesus has had to create a separate personal image, and one that places Him well off the crucifix and active and seeming to be modernly relevant. He needed to give us this new Jesus for today, or Jesus as an image was going to die in people’s minds in the same way that the religion has long been dying. And Jesus’s new image has been developing right on schedule!

Of course, hearing from Thomas that Jesus has long been working on this very problem is a great relief to me. More and more now, we are regularly seeing figures of a smiling or a laughing Jesus, or a friendly-seeming guy who looks like Jesus turning up on TV, in billboard ads, or wherever. You and I are becoming used to seeing that. Thomas tells me that all of this is just what is supposed to be happening now. So I am trying very hard to let go of this awful sense of personal responsibility to take care of Jesus that I have been feeling. Yes, Jesus does not possess a material body, so He does to some extent need us to be His surrogate hands and His voice on earth. But He has something huge that you and I can only dream of having! Jesus has the ability to influence people’s minds and hearts pretty majorly, and clearly He is doing that now, speaking internally to so many people and influencing them. So, No, you and I do not have to do this work for Him without His help. 

Jesus is God. Or rather, perhaps we ought to more aptly say that Jesus is an aspect of God. His mind is infinitely powerful. Even our own vast, eternal minds are far more powerful than are these very limited earth-minds that we use while we are here on earth, these minds which are designed just for spiritual learning, and really are not useful for much else. But we really cannot begin to grasp the vast mental complexity to which our beloved Jesus has such ready access. 

I can recall two summers ago when I was visiting Jesus with Thomas almost nightly, and I was trying to understand everything that Jesus wanted us to include on His new website. Like a fool, I was pretty star-struck and completely intimidated, shyly asking Jesus questions and trying to even think of what else to ask and what to say to Him, and I realize now that was partly because whenever you talk with Jesus in person, you have to get used to the fact that His mind is always multi-tasking, so He is paying full attention to you, but He also seems to be somewhat distracted. I didn’t realize what was going on at the time, but Thomas has recently explained it to me. And it does make sense. Think about it. How many people on earth are praying to Jesus at any given moment? Omigod, how much must Jesus have to be thinking about at once? And yet, He can do that while He also carries on a conversation, and in fact even many conversations, all at the same time. Thomas tells me that when you and I are back in our vast, eternal minds, we will to a lesser extent also be able to think of several things at once while we are carrying on multiple conversations.

So it is time for you and me to stop fretting about what is going on with Jesus on earth as a matter of our own conjectures and our very deepest fears. For a very long time, and indeed for most of my life since college as I have watched what I have known ever since then would be inevitable, I have fretted about how we might save our much-beloved Jesus from going down with the Christian ship.  Because obviously Jesus has seen the danger, too, and for even much longer than you and I have seen it.

Silly, silly me. I have always reckoned without the fact that Jesus did, you know, actually rise from the dead when, very long ago, He rose from the dead! And He has been a lot smarter about this than I have been, with my limited earth-mind’s narrow and fear-based thinking. So, with my Thomas’s loving counseling, I have been of late enjoying what has felt like a long and luxurious exhale of relief. Jesus really has got this! You and I do not have to worry. When Jesus is influencing secular publications to see His death and resurrection as a crucially important secular event, and also when He even has been careful over the past two thousand years to preserve His Shroud and His burial facecloth, and even including the miraculous image on the Shroud which was created using energy equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on earth put together in a single miraculous discharge, we know that Jesus has been thinking far ahead toward this crucial moment in time. Now someone even has been influenced by Jesus’s mind to offer a million-dollar prize to the first person who can duplicate the image on the Shroud of Turin, and thereby demonstrate (if possible) how it was produced. And I wish those contestants good luck with that! As for me, after all my years of doing afterlife research, I am a resolute skeptic about everything. And I have found that, very sad to say, earthly life hands us exceedingly few genuine miracles. I have examined the Shroud studies thoroughly, however. And I now consider the Shroud of Turin to be one of the few true earthly miracles.

So, what does all of this suggest about the future of Christianity as we all move on from here? I think that what we are going to be left with as all of the shorter-term pain settles out is Jesus’s original first-century movement exclusively. I cannot see how anything of Constantine’s invented third-century Christianity can survive. The problem is that Constantine’s Christianity, like every religion that ever was invented, is a fly in amber. It is a creature only of its own time and place, which was seventeen hundred years ago. So it is irrevocably long dead now, and preserved just as it was when it was first created by human beings, but with nothing of value to offer to us today. The Pew studies cited above abundantly confirm that to be true.  

An excellent article by a former Evangelical talks about the kinds of reasons why sincere Christians are leaving the Roman Christian faith in such numbers, and he visualizes it in terms of three buckets. He claims that the reasons that lapsed Christians are giving for leaving Christianity are quite broad and varied. But they all can be fitted into one or more of these three buckets:

• Personal Harm. This lay Christian worker and his wife had come to a place in their marriage where they felt that they needed to go their separate ways, but even an amicable divorce was never to be granted to members of a church of their denomination. So rather than love and support as they did what they felt that they had to do, their former friends in the faith offered to them only condemnation, shame and rejection.
• Institutional Dissatisfaction. It is no wonder that so many people are leaving the churches, when narrow conformity is demanded to very old rules which too often make no actual sense, and which are unloving and harmful, in particular the exclusion of the gay and lesbian community. Here again, where there should be love and forgiveness and support, there is only rigid condemnation for those who cannot toe the strict and antiquated religious line.
• Intellectual Congruence. Every form of modern Christianity still holds to the antiquated and preposterous notion that God demands that the faithful be perfectly forgiving, and yet God cannot forgive us for Adam’s sin, and let alone for our own sins, unless God first gets to watch God’s only Son die horribly on the cross as a perfect human sacrifice. Or, how else would you state that basic Roman Christian dogma? Some parishioners, too, are bothered by Christianity’s direct adherence to unscientific principles of creationism and such, which make the religion seem to be completely out of touch with modern reality.

 I think this fellow pretty much nails what is causing Roman Christianity’s decline. The religion is frozen and dead in the ancient past rather than living and spiritually growing, and there is no practical cure for its problems. What we are witnessing is a necessary and natural death by reason of old age. But something much better can follow it.

When I was meeting with Jesus two summers ago, He told me that He had come to earth to free humankind from religions altogether. He told me then that every religion is a human invention, an old way for people to seek to relate to the eternal God, which is why religions and their human-made traditions do nothing more than to come between us and God. Without the human-made restrictions of religions in the way, people will be free to develop a direct and person spiritual relationship with God, Who is Spirit. So that is to be the future Way of Jesus, which in the end will be the only Christianity that will still be in existence. It is the Christianity that Thomas expresses in The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. So I do now, yes, understand that there will indeed be a Christianity going forward. But it will not be the Romans’ Christianity. It will be the Christianity that Jesus taught.

 Dear Heart, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rosebud is heavy with dew.
And while the thrush his sleepy mate is calling,
In My Heart is calling You!
– Gene Lockhart (1891-1957) & Ernest Seitz (1892-1978), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1918)