Is the Seminar on the Historic Jesus Relevant? (Chuck Pfeifer)

Is the Seminar On the Historic Jesus Relevant?

We in the Guild have been discussing the relevance of the Records of Jesus seminar for several years.  This is serious business because this seminar has been the centerpiece of the Guild for decades.  My son sent me an article titled, “Searching for Jesus in the Gospels” which appeared in the May 24, 2010 edition of the New Yorker Magazine. (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/24/100524crat_atlarge_gopnik)  He said, "A piece like this wouldn't be written if there wasn't an interest in the study of the historic Jesus."  

Yet the discussion continues, partly because attendance at the Records seminars is down and partly because some Guild leaders have lost interest in the Records seminar in its older form.  Meanwhile, there is a good deal of interest in the theories of Wolfgang Giegerich about the evolution of consciousness.  These theories bear on our discusion.  The Guild conducted a “Re-Visioning the Records” seminar in July 2008 which I attended.  I was powerfully affected by the image of Psyche or Soul as the evolving or sublated form of the God image.  I was particularly gripped by the description of projection.  Psyche illuminates the object of projection rather than having the projection come from within.   We use processes like dialogue, imaging and art to engage the projection so that it might be integrated into our personalities.  As this happens, we are engaging Psyche.  When we observe ourselves experiencing the emotions triggered by projections and reflect them back to Psyche, we aid consciousness.

This insight has prompted me to revision the Historic Jesus seminar that I offer in Madison.  I am going to call it, “We Are More Than We Think We Are.”   I am using the thesis developed by Walter Wink' in his book, The Human Being.  Walter claims that a new archetype is arising in humankind and that it was projected onto Jesus as the Christ of Christianity.  (In this post-Christian age, individuals my project this psychic pattern onto others as well.)  I find this formulation of the seminar attractive because the image of the man Jesus still engages me.  This is not the engagement that I experienced with the Christ of Christianity when I was young nor that which I experienced as a young man in the heroic Jesus of Kazantzakis' novel, The Last Temptation of Christ.  Rather it is the image of a man who was in touch with a dimension of life that I know in myself.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described this dimension in his sermon, “A Walk Through the Holy Land,” delivered on March 29, 1959 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama.  Dr. King said, “As I tried to calculate in my own mind and in my own limited way the meaning of this cross, these things came to my mind. That first, Jesus didn’t have to go to this cross. . .  But here was a man who had the amazing capacity to be obedient to unenforceable obligations. . . There are three groups of people in the world. They are the lawless people on the one hand - people who break laws. . . Then you have a second group - the law-abiding people . . . Their standards come from the man-made law, the law written on the book, or the customs and mores of society. . . .There is a third group - those people who are committed to an inner law, those people who have an interior criteria of conduct. . . These are the people who are obedient to something that the law without could never demand and could never write for you to do. . .It might be a Jesus of Nazareth who can leave and go back to Nazareth and become merely an insignificant character in history but who said to himself, 'Oh no, I cannot follow this way. I must be true to what I know is truth and what I know is right. What I know will eventually be a part of the structure of the universe.'  And this is what the cross says to us this morning: greatness in life comes when we are obedient to the unenforceable.”

Martin Luther King Jr. captures in this eloquent statement what moves me about Jesus and what I feel in myself.  My hope is that I can lead people through a modified version of the Records asking, “How do I know that potential in myself in this the 21st century?”  Also, “How do I know the shadow part of this potential, the potential for inflation, domination, denial and repression?”  “How do I see this potential in my enemies?"  And finally, “How do I know this as something related to the very structure of the universe?”

I assume you in California will continue to plan the re-visioned records seminar as you are moved by the work of Giegerich.  I am convinced that our endeavors are worthwhile.  I think my son is correct.  “People are still interested in this man Jesus.”  I'm also convinced that we must each lead from our passion.

Finally, I feel that there is a reason for low attendance at the annual re-visioned Records seminar and perhaps other seminars.  Many of us in the Guild, who are over 50, are thoroughly modern people.  We need to position ourselves to speak to post-modern people like my son.   This means utilizing post-modern tools like Facebook, not just to advertise seminars, but to begin communicating with people whose take on the world may be very different from our own.

I am grateful that I can work with you folks in the Guild, even at a distance.  I wish us all blessings on our journey together as we engage the ongoing movement of Psyche in this process.

Chuck Pfeifer