Gentle Warrior John Yungblot

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Gentle Warrior John Yungblut--likely challenging and possibly disturbing--presents a radical revisioning of the Christian myth which will fit into the preconceptions neither of creedal Christians holding to a literal, exclusive faith nor of critics of Christianity who have left it behind with a "good riddance!" Make no mistake, his pacifist leanings notwithstanding, John Yungblut was a warrior. He loved Christianity too much not to fight for its life. He passionately believed that, uninformed by evolutionary and depth psychological revelations of the past century and a half, traditional Christianity is not only increasingly antequated and irrelevant but actually an obstruction to the emergence of a spirituality of the Earth.

If you know yourself to be drawn both to the interior life of a contemplative and to the outward manifestation of this life in action on behalf of peace and social justice, and if you have yet to meet the mind and spirit of John Yungblut, you have awaiting you a magnificent discovery.

On Addressing God as a Person

"When I address as a person, in prayer, the source of the best that is in man and the as yet unrealized potential for goodness and greatness in man, I am admittedly making use of poetic license and thinking metaphorically. But if personality is the value most important to man, I may well stand in reverence and awe before the mystery that produced it and the promise of further development that remains within it."

(Rediscovering Prayer, 45)

Calls for Celebration

"We post-Darwinian men of the twentieth century have been given an unearned increment to our celebration. Former generations of men thought original creation was completed...God at the very beginning had made everything that is—and that was that! Celebration was in order for the Creator, of course. But men had to project themselves backward infinitely in time in order to participate vicariously. Now all this is changed. Creation is unfinished. It continues to take place before our very eyes. Life is still evolving on this planet...The finger of God in Michelangelo's extraordinary painting of the Creation has not yet been withdrawn from the finger tip of Adam...Instead of an extrinsic creation, we now can envision an intrinsic one. The visual image must change. God reaches up through the still unfolding consciousness of man from the inside, still shaping the man that is to be, the new man. We are present at the creation still taking place in the ever-present now. We are entitled to think God's thoughts after him and to shout with him, ‘Behold, it is very good!’ Hallelujah!"

Dropping Allegiance to Creedal Statements, Literally Understood

“I think we have reached a stage in human development when we are called to transcend our specific religious heritages and to think in more universal, cosmic terms. Not that we should deny or neglect our roots in a particular tradition, but that we should no longer feel bound by its tenets and imagery. Certainly we should drop our allegiance to creedal statements, literally understood. We may safely retain them only if we insist that they be understood metaphorically. We have only to see what havoc loyalty to orthodox positions, fanatically held, has wrought in our contemporary world. All the major conflicts of our time are rooted in one strain of fundamentalism or another. Joseph Campbell has done us a great service in demonstrating the wisdom of articulating religious truths in the language of myth and metaphor. All else is idolatry.”