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"I was taken off guard, then, when a Wiccan friend of mine looked at me with some degree of impatience one day and said, "For someone who obviously does not know anything about what Jesus really said or did, you sure do have an attitude problem about Christianity!"

She was right. She was pointing out the difference between Jesus and Christianity; a wise thing to do. So, we decided to find a book for me that might provide some information, but not from a traditional or conservative perspective. Of course, if I' d but known, my own Unitarian Universalist churches could have provided an absolute treasure trove of exactly the kind of resources I was looking for, but it never occurred to me to ask. I never knew almost until I was considering seminary that the two denominations that merged to form UUism in 1961 were both founded on centuries-old liberal Christian heresies! I discovered those riches later, but the first book I ever read that explained Jesus from a respectful, historical and unorthodox perspective was For Christ' s Sake by Thomas Harpur. It was published by our own Beacon Press."

"Harpur' s book changed my life by introducing me to the tenets of liberal Christianity, which I have tried to outline for you here:

(1) Though we will never all agree about Jesus' relative divinity, we see in him a human exemplar, and we treasure his humanness. Those who called him "The Christ" were bestowing upon him an honorific, not claiming him to be co-equal with their God. "The Christ" means "the Anointed." It is an honorary title signifying special calling and blessing. Jesus never said he was God. I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Unitarian forebears that this orthodox understanding of Jesus is based on a misunderstanding of his message and a misreading of Scripture. When asked who he was he, actually, Jesus most often responded with another question, "Who do you say that I am?" He was a Wisdom teacher, a mystic, and a shaman.

(2) Jesus was a prophet of love and inclusivity, of justice and healing. His reforms of Judaism were not an attempt to destroy Judaism but to critique it for being overly legalistic. He was a faithful Jew. He never claimed to find a new religion or to be anything but a faithful Jewish man with an ecstatically intimate relationship to the God of Israel.

(3) Jesus preached an internal religion based on inner honesty and pure love. He wanted to encourage his people to move away from empty, outward forms of piety and observance, and more inward to a spiritual renewal based on the assurance that all human beings are equal and precious in God' s sight. Even them. They had trouble believing this because they were Jews living under imperial Rome and most were living in poverty, totally expendable people. They were all officially second-class citizens of the Roman Empire – (not even citizens!) – and among them there were the lowest of the low, the untouchables. Jesus made it a special point to accept and extend care and healing to those considered ritually unclean by Jewish and Roman purity laws.

(4) We' ll never know what the first disciples saw after Jesus' s death in the events that are now commemorated at Easter. The point is whatever they experienced totally transformed their lives. It is not necessary to believe in a physical, miraculous Resurrection to be moved by this fact.

(5) Finally, liberal Christianity is more interested in the religion of Jesus than the religion about Jesus."

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