Jesus opened his mouth and taught them…“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”

I raised my hand in our freshman Bible class at Abilene Christian College. “God seems to be very different in the Old Testament than in the New Testament. Did God change? Did God evolve over time?”

Dr. Brecheen answered calmly and reliably. “Oh no.” “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.”

I was just a 17-year-old kid, and I had no doctor’s degree but it seemed like there was some Olympian religious gymnastics going on here. First of all the text says, “Jesus Christ is the same.”

Now, I was willing to make the Gospel of John leap, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

But beyond that, my professor’s response though sincere lacked basic candor or authenticity. In one scripture God is ordering revenge & genocide and later his Son is teaching us to love and pray for our enemies so we can be like God! Jesus wouldn’t be the first son to rebel against his father, but from all I read they seemed to have a pretty tight oneness.

At this point I committed myself to reading the Bible cover to cover making every effort to forget what my fundamentalist preacher Father and Church had told me it said.

I still have that worn out Harper’s Study Bible, a holy artifact of my spiritual pilgrimage. Before I ever heard of Jung, Campbell, or Process Theology it became clear to me that either God or Humanity had evolved along the way. I have come to believe now we have essentially created God in our own image.

Ever since Emperor Constantine’s dream that envisioned a symbol of Christ on his victorious soldier’s shields Jesus Christ became a warrior God like his Old Testament father. He became the God of Empire.

In more contemporary western history this Christ God imbued and blessed the British and American Empires. The American creed is Manifest Destiny.

How did God’s non-violent conversion come about?

In 1846 a Universalist preacher named Adin Ballou wrote a book titled Christian Non-Resistance. Thoreau read it and penned an essay, Civil Disobedience. Gandhi read Thoreau and was inspired to employ non-violence to bring down the British Empire in India. A Christian Minister named King emulated Gandhi and brought non-violence to the American Empire.

An American Universalist influenced a New England Unitarian Transcendentalist who invigorated an Indian Hindu to set the captive Christ God free from Empire. The zealous Hindu served as a model for an African American Christian to call his nation to conscience through the liberated Jesus.

Here at home the urgent necessity for an evolved non-violent God comes to mind as riled up “Christian nation patriots” throw bricks through windows, spit on elected leaders, hurl vile epithets threaten lives, and “Christian Militiamen” are arrested for plotting to murder police officers.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented a 244 percent increase in the number of active Patriot groups in 2009. Militias, the paramilitary arm of the Patriot movement were a major part of the increase, growing from 42 militias in 2008 to 127 in 2009.

All the while our President makes a Sunday surprise visit to Afghanistan with an impassioned defense of the war exhuming the putrefied argument, “We were attacked viciously on 9/11…this is the region where the perpetrators of that crime, al Qaeda, still base their leadership.”

Gandhi declared & then admonished, “Jesus was the most active resister known perhaps to history. His was non-violence par excellence…I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

The Bagram tent revival closed with the ritual Presidential altar call. “God bless you. God bless the United States Armed Forces. And God bless the United States of America.”

Which God will we pledge our allegiance to; the tribal warrior Father, or his “converted” risen Son?

It is a vision of America that’s been exploited and encouraged by pundits and politicians who need this division to score points and win elections. But it is a vision of America that I am running for President to fundamentally reject – not because of a blind optimism I hold, but because of a story I’ve lived.

Our family’s story is one that spans miles and generations; races and realities. It’s the story of farmers and soldiers; city workers and single moms. It takes place in small towns and good schools; in Kansas and Kenya; on the shores of Hawaii and the streets of Chicago. It’s a varied and unlikely journey, but one that’s held together by the same simple dream.

And that is why it’s American.

That’s why I can stand here and talk about how this country is more than a collection of Red States and Blue States – because my story could only happen in the United States.

That’s why I believe that we are not as divided as our politics suggests; that the dream we share is more powerful than the differences we have – because I am living proof of that ideal.”

(Full Speech)

This is an excerpt from Barak Obama’s Jan. 29^th Speech in El Dorado, Kansas. I have been trying to get a bead on why an upstart bi-racial unknown has risen like an Apollo political spacecraft going toe to toe with the most potent Democratic Party juggernaut since FDR.

Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution contends that Obama is a ‘bargainer” who says to white’s, “I won’t hold your history of racial shame against you if you wont’ hold my color against me.” Steele further asserts that blacks like Obama offer white America redemption and absolution for their guilt and they respond with great gratitude. Steele places Oprah in this category as well.

A sound critique of Steele’s assessment comes from a surprising corner. George Will writes, “Steele has brilliantly dissected the intellectual perversities that present blacks as dependent victims, reduced to trading on their moral blackmail of whites who are eager to be blackmailed in exchange for absolution.

But Steele radically misreads Obama, missing his emancipation from those perversities. Obama seems to understand America’s race fatigue, the unbearable boredom occasioned by today’s stale politics generally, and especially by the perfunctory theatrics of race.

Steele notes that Obama “seems to have little talent for anger.” But that is because Obama has opted out of the transaction Steele vigorously deplores. The political implications of this transcendence of confining categories are many, profound and encouraging.”

(Full Article)

Cal Berkeley Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg perceptively articulates liberal’s inability to weave a narrative as a foundational failing. But, this alone doesn’t explain the Obama phenomena.

If we place Steele, Will, Nunberg and a remnant of St. Paul’s Universal Christ on the loom we may be able to fashion a full suit of clothes.

“Put off the old practices and put on the new nature…in the image of its Creator. Here there cannot be Greek or Jew…slave or free, but Christ is all in all.” (Colossians 3: 9-11).

In the past few weeks Obama has won 3 Deep South primaries including Alabama for God’s sake. White men are voting for him. A staggering 67% of youth voted for Obama in South Carolina. Caroline Kennedy’s children talked her into endorsing him.

America seeks redemption; not one where a Savior has to die, or one horse collared by guilt, but one where our worn out, threadbare garments fall to the ground. Obama embodies and eloquently speaks this quintessential American narrative. The graying boomers and the purple haired Gen X & Y’s are in Amen corner. He may not win this time around, but the hour is nigh to put on America’s emerging wardrobe.