[Dialogue] Spong Shameless commerce an opinion on death and taxes

[KroegerD at aol.com]

February 14, 2007 
The Birth of the Book - Jesus  for the Non-Religious  

It does not matter how many times it has happened before, for me it is still  
a transcendent moment. The doorbell rings, a courier bearing a package so  
important that it merits the cost of overnight delivery, is at the door. I see  
the return address to be that of my publisher, HarperCollins, and I know at 
once  what is contained in the package. Alone in my den I open it quickly, 
eyeing it  from every angle. I hold in my hands the first copy off the press of my 
newest  book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. On the cover the title is in raised 
glossy  print and thus is sensitive to the touch. It is imposed upon the face 
of a  culturally-defined portrait of how some think Jesus might have looked. 
It is  strangely shaded with lines of red, black and white. I stare at my name 
on the  cover and have intimations of immortality, though I know rationally 
that very  few literary works of any sort last more than a decade. I next look 
at the  Harper-secured endorsements on the back cover. Each brings back 
memories. One is  from Bill Press, the CNN commentator, who from 1982 to 1999 
co-anchored with Pat  Buchanan, the television debate program called "Crossfire." I 
was a guest on  that program on a couple of occasions, usually attacked by 
Buchanan and defended  by Press. The issue in one debate was homosexuality. When 
I was on camera, Pat  Buchanan said to me: "Haven't I met you before?" I 
replied, "I don't think so,  but you did call me a 'sodomite' in your syndicated 
column when I defended gay  and lesbian people from the ignorance and attacks of 
the Bible-quoting religious  right-wingers." Pat Buchanan is not dumb but he 
is not open to any reality that  does not fit easily into the value system of 
his pre-Vatican II Latin rite Roman  Catholicism. The debate was equally 
testy. The next day Bill Press called to  congratulate me on handling Buchanan's 
attacks. That's when he told me that at  one point in his life he wanted to be a 
Catholic priest and started on that  journey. It was destined not to be a 
path he was finally able to walk, but he  showed both knowledge of Christianity 
and alienation from some of its  traditional forms and those were the things 
that drew me to him. His endorsement  brought those memories back to 
consciousness.  
The second endorser was Hal Taussig, a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, who  
taught at Union Seminary in New York. Hal has also pastored a small Methodist  
church in the suburbs of Philadelphia that shares its building with a Jewish  
congregation. I once did a series of lectures there for a joint session of the  
two congregations, emphasizing their points of mutuality. Hal's most recent  
book, A New Spiritual Home, chronicles those contemporary movements in  
Christianity through which people are trying to break out of the dying patterns  of 
traditional religion and to affirm different ways to be a Christian in our  21st 
century. It is a book that affirmed my hope that there will be a Christian  
future.  
The final endorser was a Rabbi, Dr. Jack Daniel Spiro, who now heads the  
Department of Jewish Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. I co-authored  
a book with this rabbi years ago. His scholarship is exceeded only by his  
graciousness. In this book I develop the roots of Christianity that were formed  
before "The Followers of the Way," as the first Christians were called, split  
from the Synagogue to form a separate religious system. That, to the surprise 
of  many, did not occur until 88 C.E. I wanted this book to be authenticated 
by a  learned rabbi. Jack Spiro once said to me, "Jack, you have become more 
Jewish  than I am." I do see Jesus as the product of a Jewish world and it is 
this angle  of vision that illumines his life for me like nothing else. The 
favorite  Christian title for Jesus is, "The Lamb of God who takes away the sins 
of the  world." Most do not know that this title is taken verbatim from the 
Jewish  observance of Yom Kippur. The writings of the Jewish prophets were 
wrapped  around Jesus long before the gospels were written. Handel's famous 
oratorio,  "The Messiah," follows the lead of the early church that described the 
death of  Jesus, not from the vantage point of an eyewitness, but by applying the 
image of  the "suffering servant" from Isaiah 53 to Jesus and incorporating 
Psalm 22 into  the crucifixion narratives. I am now convinced that the two 
ultimate heroes of  the Jewish people, Moses and Elijah, have shaped the memory of 
Jesus more  dramatically that most of us can yet imagine. I sought to make 
these points in  this book and to have a Jewish scholar of Dr. Spiro's stature 
affirm this  perspective as true to Judaism was terribly important to me.  
After I had finished my perusal of the cover, I then opened the book, scanned 
 the table of contents and recalled the process through which I went when 
writing  each chapter. I next read the prologue, a free verse creation that I 
worked on  for weeks until it said what I wanted to say in this book and then 
turned to the  epilogue that quoted my first effort to do free verse in a poem 
entitled  "Christpower," written in 1974. This prologue and epilogue frame this 
book, but  those words also frame my entire professional career. It is thus a 
deeply  personal book.  
Next, I autographed this first copy for my wife Christine, who stands at the  
center of everything I do. She is my partner, my inspiration and the best 
editor  I have ever had and, as I said in the preface, "I love her with what some 
people  think is an unseemly passion for someone my age," but it is true. I 
am who I am  because I live inside the love of this incredible human being. 
Going upstairs I  presented this first, now autographed, copy to her. It was a 
tender moment and  is a happy memory.  
A book is an all consuming activity. For the past two or three years I have  
researched it, lectured on it, shaped it and lived it. Every chapter has gone  
through numerous versions and revisions, some amounting to complete rewrites. 
My  first task was to separate the man Jesus from the interpretive myths that 
grew  up around him well before even the gospels were written. I sought to 
find a way  into the original Jesus experience to touch the meaning of his life. 
He lived,  we now believe, between the years 4 B.C.E. and 30 C.E. No gospel, 
however, was  written until 40 to 70 years after his death. By carefully 
reading the gospels  in the order in which they were written, we can discern how 
and when these  interpretive myths developed. The Jewish idea of messiah had 
many sides. Most of  them were applied to Jesus. Messiah must be the heir to the 
throne of David so  Jesus had to be born in David's city. Micah the prophet 
had said that. That is  how the Bethlehem birth tradition developed. Next his 
birth was surrounded with  signs and wonders. However, none of that is history. 
There was no star over  Bethlehem on the night Jesus was born since in all 
probability he was born in  Nazareth. Even his parents, Mary and Joseph, appear 
to be largely fictionalized  characters. Joseph doesn't enter the Jesus 
tradition until the 9th decade in  Matthew's gospel and then he is clearly patterned 
on the life of Joseph, the  patriarch whose story is told in Genesis 37-50. 
The name of his mother Mary  appears nowhere before Mark's gospel and only once 
is her name actually  mentioned in that 8th decade work. In that first gospel 
Mary is portrayed as  anything but supportive. The idea that Jesus had a band 
of twelve disciples is  primarily about the idea that messiah must establish 
the new Israel to emulate  the old Israel which had twelve tribes. It is worth 
noting that the New  Testament cannot itself agree on who the twelve were. The 
miracle stories that  populate the gospels are also not original. They are, 
by and large, drawn out of  two earlier cycles of stories that marked the lives 
of Jewish heroes. Jesus'  nature miracles are the re-telling of stories from 
the Moses-Joshua narrative  while the healing stories and the raising of the 
dead stories come out of the  Elijah-Elisha narratives. There is also the fact, 
introduced by Isaiah (35),  that when the Kingdom of God dawns it will be 
marked with signs of wholeness:  the blind will see, the deaf hear, the lame leap 
and the mute sing. If Jesus is  the bringer of the Kingdom, the signs of the 
Kingdom must be said to mark his  life. Finally, resurrection, understood as 
the physical resuscitation of a  deceased body, does not enter the Christian 
story until the 9th decade when  Matthew just hints at it. It becomes fully 
developed only in the late 9th and  early 10th decades in the writings of Luke and 
John. Paul would have been aghast  at such an idea and Mark never tells the 
story of a resurrected Jesus appearing  to anyone. I seek to bring these little 
known biblical facts into my readers  awareness.  
Once the opening section of the book is complete and the man Jesus is  
separated from the myth, I then begin the process of understanding the myth. How  
did it develop? What does it mean? Why was it deemed appropriate? It is here  
that I probe the Jewish images that were used in the gospels to interpret him. I 
 examine the sources of everything from his miraculous birth to his cosmic  
ascension and then I look at the images that were used to understand this 
Jesus:  son of man, son of God, shepherd king, new Passover, sacrificed lamb, sin 
bearer  -- Jewish images all.  
Finally, I address the issue of what it means to call Jesus divine in the  
21st century. Can that claim still be made with integrity? Not, I argue, if we  
continue to look at him through dualistic eyes, where the supernatural is  
opposed to natural, where the divine is viewed as the opposite of the human and  
where miracle represents divine intervention. I think Christianity, as it is  
traditionally understood, is dying. I think the power of this Jesus is still  
struggling to be born. The result of this internal tension is a new portrait 
of  Jesus that emerges in the pages of this book. He is a Jesus for the  
Non-Religious, a Jesus who, in the fullness of his humanity, opens for me a  pathway 
into all that our human word God was created to reveal.  
Now the book enters the public arena and I will sit back and watch my  
creation being debated, violated and misunderstood by those whose beliefs it  will 
threaten. It will also be deeply appreciated by the audience for which I  
write. I call them "Believers in Exile." They are people for whom the God  
experience is still real, but most of the religious forms used to interpret that  
reality have lost all meaning. I hope this book will help them resume their  
spiritual journeys.  
John Shelby Spong  Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Tom Ballantine from Jackson, Mississippi, writes:  
What do you think about estate taxes? I know you want to spread it around but 
 how can you tax it twice?  
Dear Tom,  
Your question on estate taxes rose out of comments I made in a series of  
lectures I gave recently at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. In those  
lectures I supported the development of an economic system that played to the  
universal human desire to receive reward for both labor and ingenuity. I  
commented that Communism was, in my opinion, dead from the beginning because it  
did not understand this basic fact of human nature. Communism would be the 
ideal  economic system for angels who would be willing, in the words of Karl Marx, 
to  give what they have and to receive only what they need. Human beings are 
not  selfless and capitalism rewards that selfishness by a system of rewards 
in  exchange for hard work or developing new and helpful ideas.  
Capitalism, I continued, has within it the seeds of its own destruction if it 
 allows more and more of the available wealth to be confined into the hands 
of  fewer and fewer of the people. This was the capitalism that Karl Marx felt 
would  finally destroy itself. Capitalism, however, as lived out in the 
western world  has been tempered by social legislation that taxes the wealthy to 
provide  benefits for the poor and middle classes. Capitalism courts revolution 
when it  allows the wealthy to get too wealthy and the poor to get too poor.  
Unfortunately, I noted, the recent history of the United States has moved in  
exactly that direction. During the eight years of the Bill Clinton 
presidency,  which was a major portion of the decade of the 90's, more wealth was 
produced  for Americans than in any other decade in our national history. Indeed, it 
 expanded the wealth of America to twice what had been produced in the entire 
 history of an independent America. It also widened the gap between the rich 
and  the poor to levels never before seen. That gap has widened even more 
under the  presidency of George Bush and today rests at what I regard as dangerous 
levels.  Every economic program of the Bush administration has been designed 
to enhance  the wealth of the wealthy and, in fact, has exacerbated the 
poverty of the poor.  So we have an economic policy that allows CEOs to be paid 
hundreds of millions  of dollars, made up of salary and stock options, while 
refusing to provide  health care for more than 40 million citizens and allowing our 
public schools to  be significantly under funded.  
I do not think we need to remove the estate taxes as President Bush has  
proposed. There are ample ways under the present law for the wealthy to provide  
for their children and grandchildren without tax penalties. A spouse can leave  
$2,000,000 tax-exempt dollars to his or her spouse under the law now. This is 
 not a Robin Hood confiscation! Politicians use the image of the family farm 
to  protect a multitude of other vested interests. They suggest that a family 
farm  cannot be divided among a number of heirs and still function profitably 
as a  family farm. It is a smokescreen argument. First, the present law has 
ample  protection for that contingency. Second it is based on the assumption 
that all  the heirs want to be farmers, an assumption that might be true one out 
of  100,000 times. Third, those who receive an interest in the farm can either 
 retain it and share in the profits over and above the operating costs 
including  salaries, or if that is not deemed to be a good investment, they are free 
to  sell their interests to the other heirs. Fourth, there are very few 
family farms  left, since small farms are not generally profitable. Perhaps those 
who advance  this argument have not noticed that the vast number of farms in 
America are  mega-farms that can afford to buy the equipment to farm profitably 
huge  acreages. To use this argument to protect the heirs of the Bill Gates or 
the  Warren Buffets of the world is strange political rhetoric. It might be 
of  interest to note that Bill Gates' father and Warren Buffet both are 
publicly on  record as opposing the repeal of the estate tax.  
Finally, this is not twice-taxed money. As long as the person who made it,  
keeps it, he or she pays tax on it only once. When it is given to their heirs,  
it is being given to those who did not earn it. A windfall gift tax seems to 
me  to be fair, equitable and necessary for the well being of the whole body  
politic.  
A socially-sensitive, community-oriented capitalism that refuses to allow too 
 much wealth to accumulate in the hands of the super rich and too little  
opportunity provided to break the bondage of the chronically poor is, I believe,  
the best economic system for stability. At this moment in America, the gap  
between the rich and the poor is dangerously wide.  
John Shelby Spong 
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