"John Yungblut was a Christian pioneer who moved beyond all ecclesiastical boundaries in his search for truth and for God. I admired him inordinately and profited by his vision. With the skill of the poet he is, Charles Finn in this book has given Yungblut a voice to which a new generation can listen and rejoice. This book is a vital gift."

John Shelby Spong, Author of Jesus for the Non-Religious

Gentle Warrior John Yungblut--likely challenging and possibly disturbing--presents a radical revisioning of the Christian myth which will fit into the preconceptions neither of creedal Christians holding to a literal, exclusive faith nor of critics of Christianity who have left it behind with a "good riddance!" Make no mistake, his pacifist leanings notwithstanding, John Yungblut was a warrior. He loved Christianity too much not to fight for its life. He passionately believed that, uninformed by evolutionary and depth psychological revelations of the past century and a half, traditional Christianity is not only increasingly antequated and irrelevant but actually an obstruction to the emergence of a spirituality of the Earth.

If you know yourself to be drawn both to the interior life of a contemplative and to the outward manifestation of this life in action on behalf of peace and social justice, and if you have yet to meet the mind and spirit of John Yungblut, you have awaiting you a magnificent discovery.

Always a Threat

"I have sometimes wished it were possible for me also to accept the doctrines of the Church in a literal sense and to build a bastion in the mind against doubt and eternal questioning, search and research. But that way has been closed to me and, I suspect, closed for an ever increasing number of my fellows. For us, doctrines of the Church need constantly to be re-examined, for the metaphors they are, for a reality which, like God himself, resists all forms of idolatry, even including uncritical profession of literal belief. All the great metaphors of the faith must be tried in the crucible of present experience and reflection to determine in what sense they are still viable as metaphor and in what sense they need to be submitted to continued revision, restatement, or replacement."

(Rediscovering Prayer, v)

Acknowledging his own desire at times

to build a bastion against doubt and eternal questioning

reflects Yungblut's humanity and humility.

Giving such bastion-building the label of idolatry

reflects the courage of his integrity.

Trying everything in the crucible of present experience and reflection,

submitting everything to continual revision, restatement, or replacement--

such is the reason uncritical profession of literal belief

will always find in mystic a threat.

On Addressing God as a Person

"When I address as a person, in prayer, the source of the best that is in man and the as yet unrealized potential for goodness and greatness in man, I am admittedly making use of poetic license and thinking metaphorically. But if personality is the value most important to man, I may well stand in reverence and awe before the mystery that produced it and the promise of further development that remains within it."

(Rediscovering Pryayer, 45)

Some who realize that to address God as a person is necessarily to speak in metaphor,

feel they must therefore in integrity cease addressing God as a person.

Yungblut, on the other hand, can think of no better way to honor the ineffable mystery

of both the source and the promise of the pinnacle of personality

than to stand before it in reverence and awe

and address it as Person.

The Greater Miracle

"There is no need for a miraculous birth. The greater miracle is that the seed that flowered in Jesus was present throughout the uncounted millennia of the process itself."

(Rediscovering the Christ, 26)

We're so conditioned to think of Jesus

as imported from a divine elsewhere

that it comes first as a shock,

then as a sweetness,

finally as a bracing joy

to consider him a seed long germinating,

a flowering of the whole miraculous process!

Quantum Leap Forward

"From the evolutionary point of view there could have been no first man and woman living in an idyllic life in a Garden of Eden. Indeed, God could not have created man de novo. Man has been a long time coming, as long as the evolutionary process since life began on this planet, indeed as long as the age of the universe itself, since the potential for his ultimate arrival has been contained in matter from the beginning. The condition of his animal forbears may seem sometimes to man a blessed state of innocence, but if the metaphor of eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil is to symbolize the arrival of the sentient, reflective capacity in man which bestowed upon him the responsibility for moral decision, then for the modern man this can only be viewed, not as a fall, but as a quantum leap forward!"

(Rediscovering the Christ, 169)

While shaking the foundations of many,

what is being laid here is a new foundation for re-envisioning Earth and ourselves

as extensions of the process of rising initiated at the foundation of the universe.

What spiriting reversal to reread Eden's meaning

from tragic fall from innocence and grace

to quantum leap forward into the human race!

Must It not be the Same with Man?

"When an animal is evolving toward some new capacity--let us say a reptile is straining toward flight--the new species is produced by a succession of heroic individual efforts over many millennia. Constant trial and failure, and renewed effort, persists until a breaththrough comes. Must it not be the same with man?"

(Discovering God Within, 102)

Evolutionary imperative:

become an individual!

Mysticism: The Heart and Core of All True Religion

"I believe that the time has come when ecumenicity itself, great and inportant as it is, does not venture forth far enough. Here will be renewed the claim that others have made that mysticism is indeed the language of communication between the living religions because it is the heart and core of all true religion. I want to present mysticism as constituting an authentic apostolic succession within historic Christianity and as affording an opportunity for dialogue at this juncture with other religions that have a like succession, including religious humanism."

(Discovering God Within, 15)

Christian talk about ecumenism has hitherto rung

hollow

for holding the trump card claim to exclusive truth.

The Christianity espoused here claims no corner on

the market of truth,

extends respect even to religious humanism,

holds out hope that separate faiths really can sit

down in respectful dialogue

and (think of it!) learn from each other.