Biography
The Rev. Dr. John Killinger lives in Warrenton, Virginia, where he spends a great deal of time writing. A former pastor in Presbyterian and Congregational churches, he taught at Vanderbilt University for 15 years and is the author of over 50 books, among them God, The Devil, and Harry Potter. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"The Everlasting Breath of Jesus" 
Fifty years ago religious pundits said Christianity was dying. Harvey Cox wrote in The Secular City that we had entered a new era, when people were learning to live without religion.

But look at the events of the last few years. The remarkable controversy over Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ. The unflagging popularity of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, based on an old notion that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and they had a child together, and that Mary and the child escaped to France and became the center of a vast secret cult. The incredible success of the Left Behind stories, that have sold more than 40,000,000 copies and helped set the stage for what some journalists are calling the “rapture mentality” of right-wing America.

What has happened? The power and creativity of the Christian faith obviously aren't dead. They're enjoying one of the most remarkable resurgence anybody could have imagined. Why is that? What's the secret of Christianity's enduring dynamism?

Maybe it all goes back to something the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, says occurred in the upper room in Jerusalem. The disciples gathered there after the crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus suddenly appeared in their midst, even though the doors were locked. He greeted them with the customary greeting “Shalom” and showed them the wounds in his hands and side. He told them he was sending them out just as his Father had sent him. And then he did a very odd thing. The Bible says “he breathed on them.”

What was that about? Our word “inspiration,” you know, comes from the old Latin words in spirare, “to breathe into.” Jesus was inspiring the disciples by breathing his own breath into them. It's a wonder this didn't become a sacrament of the church, because it set into motion one of the most powerful forces the human spirit has ever known. Jesus breathed on the disciples and started a revolution of creativity that has never stopped.

It formed the early church, which by the fourth century became the most powerful influence in the world. It shaped the art and thought of the Middle Ages. It led to the founding of the great universities. Our culture in America grew out of the Christian Reformation. Even when the world began to look more secular, the basic impetuses of art and education and medicine and philanthropy all came from Christianity. The creativity Jesus released in that little room in Jerusalem when he breathed on his disciples shaped and reshaped the world for centuries.

We can't imagine our culture without it. The great cathedrals, our legal and judicial systems, our whole understanding of morality, our arts, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Mozart, the modern university system, the healing professions, social services, the idea of a United Nations, world service organizations – none of them would have happened without the enduring breath of Christ.

And that heritage keeps being renewed. This is why there's a resurgence of religious interest in our own time. The creative power is still there. It's still at work in our lives and culture.

You've probably heard the phrase “Caesar's breath.” It is science's way of reminding us that energy never dies or disappears. The molecules of Caesar's breath, 2,000 years ago, are still in our atmosphere today. They have scattered around the globe and we are breathing them with every breath we take. Christ's breath is still alive too. The breath he breathed into the disciples that day in the upper room – the spirit and power of God – is still circulating. And it is far more powerful than Caesar's breath. It's the reminder that God, whose spirit hovered over the face of the deep at creation, was still making the world through Christ and is still working on it today.

Where is that spirit operating now? What will its new manifestations be? That's the trick, isn't it, to try to see it, to anticipate it, before it happens. To guess which way the power of God is going.

I will tell you one thing. If the past is any guide, the Spirit of God will manifest itself in such creative ways that we'll be totally surprised. It will be something we probably never guessed or expected. I've been studying it for a long time, and I will tell you what I think. I can't be sure. Nobody can. But I will tell you what I think.

I think, with the new globalism produced by electronic communications and modern travel and the erosion of old economic and political barriers, that a hundred years from now we shall see a Christianity vastly transformed by its openness to other religions and its desire to relate to them in the quest for a new and higher form of spirituality.

I know that idea is threatening to a lot of people. That's why fundamentalism is so strong in our country. People are scared of the unknown. They cling desperately to what they regard as the great pillars of their own faith and believe the world will come to an end if those pillars are threatened in any way. That's why the Left Behind books are so popular. They convince frightened believers that the world is about to come to an end because their old religious culture is under siege.

And it isn't just in our country. There's a brand of fundamentalism in almost every religion in the world right now. That's why Islamic fundamentalists have been so successful in rallying Muslim fanatics against America. They too are afraid of the collapse of the only culture they have known.

But this frightening time we are in is a great creative opportunity, and the inspiration breathed into the apostles all those centuries ago is still alive today, and it will respond to the opportunity by forging a new Christianity for a new age. It will produce new understandings of the world, and new theologies and ethics, and new forms of worship and devotion, and new societies for advancing all of these.

Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State who has become one of the world's leading oracles, said recently in The Washington Post that we are all too shortsighted. While we are focusing our attention on the Middle East and our troubles with al Queda and the terrorists, something of much greater significance is occurring. It has to do with Asia, which Kissinger says is becoming the next great focus of manufacturing and economic power in the world, and which will soon rearrange all our perspectives of who we are and what it means to be members of the world order.

Suppose he is right. Already Buddhism and Hinduism and other Asian religions are becoming popular in the West. What will the ascendancy of the East do to alter the playing field for Christianity? My guess is that Christianity is up to it – that the creative power that has been there from the beginning, since that day when Jesus breathed on the disciples, will prove itself as strong as ever. Nothing will look the same after the revolution. But the spirit of Christ will still be there, shaping a new world for our children and their children and their children after them.

I remember a delightful little white-haired lady I used to visit in one of my parishes. Her name was Deanne Gwaltney. I sometimes teased Deanne about having a man’s name, and told her I had once been a dean too, but had given it up for a worse job, being a preacher. I once asked Deanne, who was then in her eighties, how she felt about all the change taking place in the world around us. “Oh, I don’t worry about it at all,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “You know, God has always managed to bring the best out of the worst, and somehow I don’t think God will fail us now!”

Interview with John Killinger
Interviewed by Lydia Talbot

Lydia Talbot: John, you have an amazing sense of history and an amazing capacity to forecast the future. In your message on inspiration, you convey they story of Christ’s breath. I must ask you, how does that breath of Christ inspire you personally these days?

John Killinger: Well, I don’t know. Maybe sometimes, I think, too much. I feel, as I get older, released to do so many things that I didn’t have time to do before. I spend a lot of time writing, as you said earlier. In fact I hate to admit it, but in the last year I’ve written five books. That’s too many! I admire people who take ten years on one book. I feel a little suspicious of anyone who writes that quickly. Maybe that’s the breath of Christ to some extent. He may be responsible for the good things and I’ll take the credit for the bad things.

Talbot: You told me before the program that your message on inspiration was a challenge to write. Why?

Killinger: I think just dealing with the whole idea of inspiration as more than a kind of sentimental thing that happens to people when they see a tree or a flower or something like that. I think the challenge was in the fact that this is a central category of Christian faith and theology and to try to treat it with broader strokes than I would have used had I been addressing the Ladies Aid Society or something like that.

Talbot: There are people who would say that war and violence are the air that we’re breathing these days.

Killinger: Well, they certainly are. But on the other hand you have to back off and look at the world and all that happens to it over the years and you realize that we have cycles of war and destruction and then cycles of rebuilding and rediscovery. Pain and resurrection are often mingled together. We are going through a very bad patch right now, there’s no doubt about it. But I think at the same time we have to remember that people have been through even worse in the past and have come back with bells ringing.

Talbot: You ended your message with a wonderful story about Deanne, the lovely elderly lady parishioner whose twinkle in her eye, I think, is still a source of inspiration for you. Is it because our seniors are the ones who remember the past?

Killinger: I think that is part of it and part of the remembering the past enables them to live a little bit like this: I remember an author named Roger Babcock who once wrote about the little duck that floated on the water. No matter how big the waves were, the little duck just managed to ride over them. He talked about getting to the point in life where we can do that, where we are not submerged by every wave that comes along. We can have this buoyancy that comes from faith and understanding that allows us then to ride out the havoc.

Talbot: Submerged and most of us, as Studs Terkel says, are suffering from a “national Alzheimer’s Disease.” We don’t remember what happened a moment ago. But in Deanne’s case she was optimistic about the future.

Killinger: She wasn’t necessarily a student of history or anything like that. But I think at 80 years old, she had lived a life of faith and she had this kind of gyroscope in her that kept her upright despite whatever was happening to her. Here was a little lady who was having the physical ailments you have at that age and who lived alone—she had lost her family and everything. She was really alone and yet she had that buoyancy that comes from knowing your Lord and knowing that life is going to go on beautifully if you’ll let it.

Talbot: The continuing dynamism of Christianity, as you point out. Isn’t that because of it’s capacity to be ever evolving as Karl Barth would say?

Killinger: Yes. Christianity is so big and so flexible and is so capable of adapting. This is why I think it’s unfortunate that some people feel that they have to defend it and keep it just the way it was, who are unwilling for it to change and adapt. It betrays a kind of deep inner fear about life itself. Christianity didn’t teach us that. Christianity teaches us to trust.

Talbot: You have been teaching about trust and helping us to come to grips with some of those fears in our culture. Thank you, John Killinger.