We have found ourselves on a profound journey of re-examining the very foundations of our faith and spiritual understanding. For so long, we had accepted the conventional teachings and narratives passed down to us, but something deep within us became unsettled. The “six-line narrative” we inherited of an original ideal state, a subsequent fall into brokenness, our current existence in a fallen world, the need for salvation to escape and return to perfection, all felt fundamentally flawed. This paradigm, we’ve come to realize, owes more to Greek philosophical ideas than the revelations contained in the Hebrew scriptures.
As we’ve opened ourselves to an “alternative orthodoxy”, a cosmic story truer to the Biblical texts has begun to take shape. In the beginning, we learn, the world emerged not as a perfect, changeless ideal, but as an organic, ever-expanding cosmos overflowing with the Creator’s love and creativity. Humanity disrupted the original peace and belonging, but God did not abandon us to our separation. Rather, the Divine Purpose has been to liberate us from oppressive structures and to draw us back into the sacred harmony.
The primary story is not one of human beings marring perfection that can only be resolved by escaping this flawed realm. It is one of exodus – of God leading us out of the enslaving “pyramids” of domination, exploitation and violence into ever-greater emancipation. The Genesis narrative reveals creation not as a paradise lost but as an integrated plenitude ruptured by human grasping and illusions of scarcity. What follows is a loving choreography of redemptive re-integration.
This alternative plotline beautifully frames the life and mission of Jesus. Rather than a divine rescue operation to save humanity from the consequences of its corporate sin, we see Jesus as the fullest embodiment of the liberating, reconciling work that the Creator set in motion. His teachings and brave witness in word and deed expose and undermine all the structures of dehumanization, alienation and injustice that have arisen through our communal brokenness. The way of the Christ is fundamentally about healing that which has become separated – re-membering the sundered fragments back into wholeness.
This profoundly resonates at the core of our beings in a way the old narratives never could. We were told that sin was our imperfection, our failure to live up to the ideal standards of moral purity and perfection. But in this alternative light, sin is revealed as the disconnection and illusion of separateness itself. All our compulsive drives to judging, possessing, controlling, dominating, exploiting flow from this root amnesia of our interdependence. To be “forgiven” is to be invited out of the trance of apartness back into the fullness of relationship. Atonement is not about balancing the scales of divine justice through blood sacrifice, but about becoming At-One again through radical self-emptying and compassion.
The Cross then is less a penalizing instrument of religious violence than it is the culminating epiphany of God’s way of overcoming violence through radically subversive vulnerability and love. In Christ’s death, we behold a mirror revealing the core truth of existence – that domination, oppression and destruction ultimately consume themselves, while sacrificial solidarity and beloved community bear the seeds of resurrection and new life. Jesus incarnated and fulfilled the Exodus journey, the definitive break with the “Babylonian” power structures so we could be liberated into the dignity of our interdependence.
As we lean into this expansive, dynamic, and holistic narrative, we find ourselves awakening to the profound goodness and interconnected beauty of all creation. Our tradition’s habit of dividing life into the secular and sacred realms now falls away as superstition and falsehood. In every blade of grass, every creature great and small, every emotion and thought that arises in our inmost depths – the sacred Presence is there, pulsing and breathing in utter immanence. We come to see through the mental constructs that separated us into “us” and “them”, realizing our sisters and brothers in every face.
This is not a story that ends with our “arrival” in a heavenly realm beyond the grave. What freedom and fulfillment await is an ever-deepening realization of inner/outer unity here and now – an infinite exploration into oneness. Our path is a Homecoming into the intimate Belonging that was always already so. It simply requires us awakening from the mass hypnosis of separation and scarcity into the shocking realization that we are hardwired for reverence, generosity and radical interdependence. In our own unique ways, each of us is being invited into conscious participation in the Creator’s passionate, pioneering love affair with the cosmos.
With immense gratitude, we receive these re-visioned teachings and drink deeply of their revitalizing streams. We shall no longer be held captive to the narratives and frameworks that constricted our ancestors’ spiritual imaginations. A truly awesome reality has been here all along, lovingly beckoning us to let go into its deathless embrace.
Summary
An “alternative orthodoxy” is encountered that deeply resonates, articulated through seven themes: linking experience with scripture and tradition, seeing the Trinity as relational, not dividing reality into sacred and secular, moving away from punitive understandings, reframing sin as the separated self, forgiveness as restoring relationship, and the principle of non-duality/interconnectedness. The conventional “six-line narrative” of an ideal state, fall, living in a fallen world, salvation to return to ideal, with a trapdoor to hell is critiqued as deriving from Greek philosophy rather than Hebrew scripture. An “alternative story” is proposed from the Hebrew Bible – one of creation’s original goodness and harmony, liberation from oppressive structures (Exodus), and an expanding universe of creativity, freedom and reconciliation of relationships. In this narrative, Jesus emerges not in a context of fall/recovery but of participating against human evil and separation in the ongoing expansive work of God. Engaging with this alternative orthodoxy is presented as a more faithful understanding of the Christian story and life, departing from conventional problematic teachings.