"...and I hope no one takes offense when I say this, but I see Jesus Christ as sort of a wet lump of clay... it can be shaped and stretched to fit the needs of different people and groups as time goes on." - Prof. Timothy Wadkins

For many, it seems as though the purpose of religion is to somehow receive divinely-inspired information and enact it in one's daily life. In our Western religious traditions, the most important regulations have been set -- sometimes quite literally -- in stone. From the Ten Commandments right on through to The Fundamentals and other modern declarations of inerrancy, religion is regarded as formative: God acts to effect change in a created world.

Another approach to religion -- and the approach to which I unabashedly adhere -- holds that religion is every bit as formed as it is formative. As a student of Christian history at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, I came to appreciate the extent to which religion and religiosity can be developed or curtailed, abridged or elaborated, and used or abused as demanded by various circumstances and contexts. I came to understand Christianity first as the product of Hellenistic and Roman influences as much as it apparently grew out of Judaism. I traced strands of tradition as they were co-opted by empires and revolutionaries alike, from Constantine to the Crusades to Calvin to Colonialism. Everything I learned only corroborated the thesis that I heard reformulated during my last semester as an undergraduate: Christianity is a wet lump of clay, and it's changing even now.

The formation of my attitudes about religion -- and especially the mutability of religion -- can be traced much earlier than my formal training in religious studies, however. In the most concise terms, my religious upbringing could be described as "vaguely Protestant." I was baptized an Episcopal, attended a Greek Orthodox pre-school, learned the not-so-hard and fast facts about Heaven and Hell at Sunday school sessions in the Reformed Church in America, and partipated in Catholic liturgy at my Jesuit university. The goals of my parents were consistent with the mutability thesis: they wanted to give my siblings and I both a sense of faith and a well-established zone of freedom when it came to fixing the particularities of that faith. I guess it worked. I believe in God, but I've thrown the particularities out the window. Well, I guess it sort of worked.

When I signed up to help put on a Passion play at Harvard Divinity School and explore the history of Passion plays, my motivations were purely theatrical. Having gone into severe drama withdrawl since leaving college, I wanted nothing more than to do another show. It is significant, however, that my experiences with the HDS Passion Play this past semester have refined -- in some unexpected and important ways -- my attitudes toward atonement theology. While I still have much to learn and consider, I can honestly say that this new encounter with the Passion has caused me to seriously rethink my earlier rejecions of "the Atonement" as foreign, unintelligible, and spiritually useless.

It is my hope that the following panels -- my own "Stations of the Cross" in this new electronic medium -- serve to inform their visitors about some of my feelings on the Harvard Divinity School Passion Play, my personal take on atonement theology, and my feelings about Christianity overall. I also realize that these hopes are unrealistic. At best, my "e-stations" should serve as an appropriate capstone on my own "Passion Play" experiences, and hopefully provide an intelligible glimmer of those experiences, however small, to those who view them. Enjoy!

David Ryan Bard
May, 2006