The Non-Crucified Jesus
The Non-Crucified Jesus
The musings of Eckhart Tolle reveal the same word games when it comes to the historical Jesus. Tolle is the master of saying nothing while the masses sit and gaze at him in awe. I find it hard to believe that his pronouncements on life’s deepest issues are actually taken with any seriousness by his readers. That is as kindly as I can state it. Here is his treatment of the phrase “the way of the cross”:
There are many accounts of people who say they have found God through their deep suffering, and there is the Christian expression “the way of the cross,” which I suppose points to the same thing… Strictly speaking, they did not find God through their suffering… I don’t call it finding God, because how can you find that which was never lost, the very life that you are? The word God is limiting not only because of thousands of years of misperception and misuse, but also because it implies an entity other than you. God is Being itself, not a being. There can be no subject-object relationship here, no duality, no you and God… The worst thing in your life, your cross, turns into the best thing that ever happened to you, by forcing you into surrender, into “death,” forcing you to become as nothing, to become as God—because God, too, is nothing.2
I remember in my teens listening to a sermon titled “Something About Nothing.” As we walked out of the church, and everyone was secretly wondering what on earth that was about, one man leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “At least he warned us about the content.” Tolle is the most verbose writer on “nothing” one can read. But he sure does it well. By the time you finish the book you are no longer in the same “now” as when you started, and, fascinatingly, you are no longer the same “you” who began it. Such discussions, once saved for comedian Bob Newhart in his comedy routine as a psychiatrist, now are mass-marketed as brilliance and enlightenment.