The time has come for us to think of Christianity in a different way. Instead of thinking of God entering human life from outside in the person of Jesus, we have to begin to see human life evolving to the place where it opens itself into an experience of divinity.

I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God.

God is a presence that I can never define but I could never deny.

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

I was raised pretty much a fundamentalist, but the one thing that fundamentalism gave to me was the love for that book and a commitment to read and study it. The difficulty is that I've read it all, I didn't skip around, I read it all, and when you read it all, you can't take it literally because you don't want to blame God for a lot of stuff that occurs in that book. There are some pretty violent scenes.

As for the status of Western Christianity, we are in a place where our task is to redefine the primary symbols of our faith or tradition in a more human direction. That's the thing I spend my time doing.

There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance.