Biblically, the point of Jesus' death and resurrection to pay for the sins of mankind. To me, this entails accepting the Creation account and the Fall to a large degree and believing in the God of the OT. This makes no sense whatsoever with what we know about the history of the earth as well as what what NDEs, etc tell us about the nature of God and the afterlife. What kind of cobbled up theology are these spirits peddling?
I'm not sure that all of this quite follows. I mean I know that 'believing any part of the Bible requires accepting all of this very narrow and particular set of beliefs' is what fundamentalist churches TEACH, but I think they're not quite correct on that. I grew up in a very strict fundamentalist Evangelical-Pentecostal church myself - but also with a mother who had personally experienced NDEs and had a somewhat different perspective on theology - so I think I understand where you're coming from.
For what it's worth, my take on Christianity is this:
1. I believe Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person.
2. I believe miracles of physical healing happen - I have a brother who sees them happen quite regularly in Pentecostal meetings that he leads. He himself is clear that he doesn't control them happening, but sometimes gets a mental impression that one is about to happen. I have no clue what the physical mechanism of healing is, but it seems clear to me that there is one and they can be either slow or very fast and dramatic. The dramatic ones are rare but can occur.
3. I believe communication between deceased human people and the living is possible. There seems to be a huge amount of evidence that it occurs, via mechanisms including dreams, automatic writing, full trance channelling, and sometimes apparitions or vision.
3. The Gospel accounts of the resurrection of Lazarus seem to fall into category 2: a particularly dramatic physical healing. Given the existence of 2, it doesn't strike me as impossible. The resurrection of Jesus seems to be more something like 3, since there seems to be an emphasis (by both the Gospel writers and even Paul later) that the 'resurrection body is a spiritual body', which makes it seem like a kind of mass apparition that went on for about a month or so. If we take the Gospel accounts at face value, while it seems like people could touch Jesus' body and he could eat, he could also appear and disappear and walk through walls, so it seems like it wasn't quite a physical body as we understand it. Again, if we take as granted the testimony from spirit communicators that a spiritual world exists and it's somehow 'more real' than our physical world, this doesn't seem surprising - just unique. The Gospel accounts may be distorted, but *similar* things have been reported, so it just seems like a matter of degree, not kind.
4. The whole thing about Jesus being 'the son of God' and 'the sacrificial lamb' and 'dying for our sins'... may or may not be the best way of understanding what his life and teaching was about. I think if we think about Jesus as just being a particularly enlightened person - ie, someone whose spiritual sense 'fully switched on' every moment of his life, in the way that say NDE experiencers or advanced meditators report feeling for just one moment and which can transform their entire life - I think some of this snaps into focus a bit more. At least it does for me.
It seems that in the spiritual realms there's much more of a sense of every moment being 'planned' by some cosmic agency, a desire to do good, and all of human life being shared. If Jesus was intensely spiritually aware, he would presumably have these feelings very strongly. At this level of spiritual experience or 'activation' I think just being in mental contact with other people who were struggling would count as 'suffering for our sins' - in the same way that, eg, a parent holding a sick child will intensely feel distressed by the suffering of the child. His particular experience while dying might have amplified this sense of connection with the human race, or it might just be that dying *is* the price paid for living as a human, and Jesus as an advanced spirit simply wished to be fully human.
I do believe that Jesus taught that his disciples should do what he did, which means that he didn't consider himself unapproachably unique (in the way that fundamentalists often do); rather that he was living and demonstrating some more general principle that's available to all humanity. If that's true, I think the idea of 'sacrifice' and 'suffering for others' sins' must be a general principle that anyone who engages in a life of love and service to others must experience. It sounds horrible and awful but it does have a kind of logic to it. If we reach out in a spirit of love beyond our own lives into the lives of others, at some point we must exceed our comfort zone, and at some point we will suffer pain or loss that we simply have to 'forgive' (in the sense of 'releasing a debt' - not requiring payment for).
Certainly there was nothing particularly special about being crucified in 1st century Palestine - it was a common Roman punishment for criminals AND rebels. To many of the Jewish insurgents and nationalists - as with Islamic rebels today - being crucified by an occupying military would have been seen as an *honour*, as dying for one's country, and this ideal of 'heroic death' informs a lot of the rather masochistic way the Gospels are written. Even the Greeks and Romans had that idea, that a true man should demonstrate it by dying messily for his ideals, in a way that perhaps we don't today. I think the difference with Jesus' death was that he wasn't a MILITARY rebel. To the extent that Jesus was special it may have been in that he *didn't* count himself special. and was simply open to God or loving spiritual energy at all times.
I feel that Jesus and 'the Cross' are actually opposite poles from one another. Crucifixion was a human invention and although Jesus suffered this, he didn't create it. I think he was a gentle person and a healer. I don't think he is responsible for a lot of the pain that various churches have unleashed in his name. In fact I think many churches cause him deep grief.
For me personally, I feel like A Course In Miracles has a very good chance of being a communication from the actual Jesus of Nazareth. I could be wrong. It's just that it has a particular 'resonance' with me that I find hard to describe. There's a simplicity about its message that I find very powerful but also, to me, lines up with the parts of the Gospel that seem closest to the direct teaching of Jesus: eg the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel of John. The Jesus of ACIM is very clear that we ALL have a direct connection with God (who is neither male nor female, in fact is wider than 'all that is', but is apparently best understood by us as LOVE) and that Jesus is simply a 'fully awakened human' who is available to provide spiritual help if we ask for it. I could see how the Jesus of ACIM could actually be a teacher who could unite the world's religions - and also could be attacked by religious people as a heretic for being too universal and too accepting. The teaching of ACIM Jesus seems to have a lot in common with Buddhism, for instance - but seems to combine elements of Buddhist and Jewish thought in a way that could unite both.
I agree that a lot of the churches seem to spend far too much energy focusing on 'the specialness of Jesus' and using faith tests and creeds to divide people into 'saved and 'unsaved' tribes - rather than what Jesus (as described in the Gospels) TAUGHT, which seems to be the opposite of that.
This is a reason why I'm interested in NDEs and afterlife communications, because I think they can help balance the traditional religious perspective which has very often become far too narrow, and misinterpreted even the texts that have been handed down.
Regards, Nate