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Audiotapes
Once & Future Jesus Conference
Fall 1999
Complete Set $150.00 Add to cart
Lectures $12.50 each Panels $16.00 each Order below
Marcus Borg
Revisioning Christianity
at the Millennium
Once & Future Jesus Conference
Over the last half century, an older understanding of Christianity has ceased to be persuasive to millions of people in North America. Seeing the Bible as a divine product, this older understanding was, in harder and softer forms, quite literalistic, doctrinal, moralistic, exclusivistic, and oriented toward an afterlife. This lecture sketches a revisioning of foundational Christian claims about the Bible, God, and Jesus. What emerges is a non-literalistic, non-exclusivistic and relational understanding of what it means to be Christian.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours,, $12.50
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John Dominic Crossan
A Future for Christian Faith?
Once & Future Jesus Conference
After thirty years researching and reconstructing the historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan looks at the future of the Christian God, the Christian Christ, and the Christian Church. One element of the future is already very clear. The debate of the next century will not be between science and religion, as was the discussion of this century. It will be between fantasy and religion, and it is not at all clear that religion will win.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Robert W. Funk
The Once and Future Jesus
Once & Future Jesus Conference
A Jesus liberated from his ancient mythological frame is emerging as the provocateur of a new Jesus movement. That movement seeks to enlist strong poets, engage unemployed educators, and take up residence in burned out churches, in the process of creating new therapies, real world goods and services, and family/enclave formation. Its success will depend on whether it creates models that can be imitated or spawns a mass movement focused on specific social, political, and religious issues.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Lloyd Geering
The Legacy of Christianity
Once & Future Jesus Conference
We are entering a global world which, because it does not conform to the expectations of classical Christianity, is being called post-Christian. In this world,
Christianity needs to be seen as something wider and more open-ended than Christian orthodoxy. It names a stream of cultural influence which, like the wind, is free to "blow where it wills."
Just as Christianity could not be held within ancient Judaism, neither can it be held
within the boundaries of classical Christian orthodoxy or of the now-fragmented contemporary ecclesiastical organization. What is there within this stream, including
the continuing influence of Jesus of Nazareth and the spiritual legacies of other cultures, which may help the new global world to evolve a viable and sustainable future for humankind?
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Karen L. King
Back to the Future
Jesus and Heresy
Once & Future Jesus Conference
Historical criticism has given us a Jesus both less and more than we ever imagined. If we reliably have fewer of his words and deeds, we also have more of his afterlife as
seen in the hearts and minds of his followers. Of the diverse ways these followers thought and lived, early Christian controversies supposedly weeded out the "wrong"
ways, instituting a foundation of "orthodoxy." But controversies about the "real Jesus" seem far from over, and the so-called heresies of the earliest Christians may be as popular as ever.
The results of historical criticism offer resources beyond the narrow politics of
dogmatism and orthodoxy. But they also suggests a need for reflection about our own use of the rhetoric of imagining the future. What do these results bode for the future?
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Gerd Lüdemann
From Faith to Knowledge
The Contribution of Jesus to Cosmic Awareness
Once & Future Jesus Conference
When we read Jesus through the eyes of the Christian gnostics behind the Nag Hammadi Library, two questions arise: How do the gnostic idea of resurrection and the theology of names in the Gospel of Philip relate to Jesus' idea of faith? How are we to understand Jesus' notion of his heavenly Father in relation to the gnostic idea of the unknown god and the creator god Jaldabaoth? We may also ask what the early Christian and gnostic experience of God have in common with present day mystical experience. This experience might very well be called the future faith based on the symbol of the cosmic Christ.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Thomas Sheehan
From Divinity to Infinity
A Future for Faith in the New Millennium
Once & Future Jesus Conference
In looking at a future for faith, we may be working with the wrong ideas of God and the God-human relation. All research operates with tacit presuppositions, many of them philosophical and, in the case of historical Jesus research, theological. One of our jobs is to reveal and critically evaluate such presuppositions, along with the paradigm they help to shape. This presentation probes a possible "Copernican Turn" or paradigm shift in our understanding of God, revelation, and human being, and discusses how Jesus' message of the kingdom might look within that new paradigm.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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John Shelby Spong
Christ and the Body of Christ
What Will the Church of Tomorrow Be?
Once & Future Jesus Conference
If God can no longer be conceived of in supernatural invasive terms, and if Jesus can no longer be understood as the incarnation of that supernatural deity, is there still
something about the Christian claims that compels our attention and even our worship? If the church was created to be the community through which these ancient
understandings were said to be lived out, does it still have a role to play as the Body of Christ in our non-theistic future?
The great need of the Christian church today is for a mighty reformation that will address both theology and structure—a reformation infinitely more powerful than that
of the sixteenth century. It must rethink basic assertions, including Christian claims to revelation, creedal accuracy, and authority. If it does not come, or if it is too weak or
modest, then there is no realistic future for the Christian enterprise.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Walter Wink
The Son of Man
The Stone that the Builders Rejected
Once & Future Jesus Conference
The Son of Man was virtually dismissed as irrelevant by the Jesus Seminar: only two of the approximately 80 "Son of Man" sayings were voted pink (probably authentic) and none were voted red (undoubtedly authentic). Walter Wink maintains that this stone that the builders rejected will in the future become the cornerstone of a new christology. In this christology, the stress falls not on Jesus' divinity but on his humanity; not on the myth about Jesus but on Jesus living out his own myth; not on worshipping Jesus but on continuing his ministry; not on his being the sole incarnation of God but on one who incarnated God and teaches us how to incarnate God as well.
1 audiotape, 1½ hours, $12.50
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Panel Discussion
The Future of Jesus
Once & Future Jesus Conference
Moderated by Daryl D. Schmidt
Featuring John Dominic Crossan, Sanford Lowe, Robert J. Miller, Bernard Brandon Scott, James A. Veitch
The process and results of the quest of the historical Jesus have a profound impact on our understanding of Jesus and Christian origins. These new understandings mean that Jesus will play a very different role in the twenty-first century. Who Jesus was—revolutionary, sage, end-time prophet?—leads inevitably to questions about who he will be. Among the questions: What is the next stage in the quest? What are the implications for each of the different portraits of Jesus? How will these understandings affect the future relationship of Christianity to Judaism and other religions?
2 audiotapes,, 2 hours, $16.00
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Panel Discussion
The Church of the Future
Once & Future Jesus Conference
Moderated by Lane C. McGaughy
Featuring Marcus Borg, Gerd Lüdemann, John Shelby Spong,
Hal Taussig, Walter Wink
Since the Enlightenment and the rise of the modern worldview, church and theology have gradually separated. Theology has transformed itself into religious studies and churches have been left to stagnate in the creeds and structures inherited from the fourth century. In the wake of this split, what is the justification for the church in a pluralistic and post-Christian world? Can new communal structures and patterns of celebration be created which will salvage the churches in the next century? What kind of leadership is needed to revitalize, perhaps even to rebuild, forms of Christian comunity relevant for our times? Most importantly, is the future of Jesus' message and example bound to the fate of traditional forms of church organization and worship?
2 audiotapes,, 2 hours, $16.00
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Panel Discussion
The Future of the Faith
Once & Future Jesus Conference
Moderated by Roy W. Hoover
Featuring Lloyd Geering, Karen L. King, Thomas Sheehan,
John Shelby Spong, Robert W. Funk
Profound questions of faith arose with the quest of the historical Jesus and those questions are more significant and timely than ever. The challenge is to constructively address the way new findings can work within or without the traditions. In reflecting on the future of the faith, many questions must be answered: In light of the research, what are the meanings and the possibilities suggested by Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God? Is thinking historically optional or crucial for the future of the faith? Do the cross and the resurrection remain significant?
2 audiotapes,, 2 hours, $16.00font>
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