[Dialogue] Spong on God-Jesus-the church

[KroegerD at aol.com]

February 28, 2007 
Why Did You Write JESUS FOR THE  NON-RELIGIOUS? The Perennial Question  

A new book possesses for its author and sometimes even for its potential  
readers a mysterious quality. Writing a book represents such a large investment  
of time and energy that something has to compel the author to undertake it. A  
novelist, for example, must be captured by the plot that he or she plans to  
develop. A biographer must be drawn to the life that he or she plans to 
describe  and to interpret. What is it then that drives an author like me to write 
about  the things in which I most deeply believe, to invite others to consider 
my  particular understanding of God or to commend to my readers the faith 
tradition  and the values that I espouse? That is something I have discovered that 
people  yearn to understand. Since the publication of Jesus for the 
Non-Religious  in February, I have faced that question many times. It has come from 
family and  friends, from letters and from both reviewers and journalists writing 
about the  book. The level of interest in this question has been such that I 
decided to use  this column to share my answer. My religious convictions are 
so personal and so  close to the center of my life that they produce passions 
that frequently  surprise even me. I find myself deeply torn by the rising 
tensions in the  Christian World today and even repelled by so much that passes 
for today's  Christianity. The debate that threatens to rip my particular church 
apart is  based on a misunderstanding of authentic Christianity that is so 
deep and so  total that I wonder how it is possible that it has come to dominate 
our common  life. Can this really be Christianity?  
I am and always have been deeply committed to Jesus. I have felt the impact  
of his life and experienced the meaning of the God that I believe is revealed 
in  him. Both my personal and my professional life have been dedicated to the 
church  that I presumed was created to live out the meaning found in his life. 
Does not  the church call itself "the Body of Christ?" Increasingly, however, 
I have found  myself put off by the way this Jesus experience has come to be 
understood and  proclaimed by that institution, which I believe has strayed 
far from its roots.  I have addressed this tension tangentially before, but 
finally, in this book I  decided I must take it on directly because I have no 
desire to be part of a  church that cannot confront its own prejudices, or indeed 
that seems to be on  the verge of institutionalizing those prejudices.  
Jesus represents to me a "God experience," one that expanded life, increased  
love and enhanced our humanity. In fact it has been the church's faith that 
in  his life we human beings encountered that which is meant when we say the 
word  'God.' Emanating from this life I perceived was a presence and a power 
that  validated the extraordinary claims that people have made for him through 
the  ages. I have never been as interested in debating the accuracy of those 
claims  as I have been in understanding what there was about his life that made 
them  seem necessary. For most of my life I have searched for a way to separate 
the  power that I believe was present in the Jesus experience from the 
various ways  that experience has traditionally been explained. The analogy I have 
used to  help people grasp this distinction is to invite them to look at the 
phenomenon  that we call epilepsy. The epileptic experience would be identical 
whether it  occurred in the 1st century or the 21st century. The way 1st 
century people  explained that experience, however, would differ widely from the 
explanation of  21st century people. Can we not understand that the Jesus 
experience might also  be explained in vastly different ways by 1st century people 
from the way 21st  century people do today? When 1st century explanations were 
then literalized  into creeds, doctrines and dogmas, Christianity's essence was 
distorted.  Christianity increasingly offered its world a badly dated, 
brittle and closed  understanding of Jesus' life. It confronted its rapidly changing 
world with a  mentality that limited the choice of many seekers to strange, 
lifeless options:  "become a literalist or join the Church Alumni Association." 
I have no interest  in either alternative.  
Why do we not understand that every explanation of anything is filtered  
through the presuppositions, the world view and the level of knowledge available  
to the explainer? That is why every explanation is both time-bound and  
time-warped. That is also why there can be no such thing as an infallible set of  
human propositions called a creed or an inerrant piece of human writing called a 
 Bible. It is, therefore, nothing but an illusory power play when the church  
claims that its sacred formularies have somehow escaped the obvious 
subjectivity  of words. When that truth is realized, all ecclesiastical claims about  
possessing unchanging and ultimate truth are relativized. Every reformation  
begins in this understanding. It was my intention in this book first to  
establish that truth and then to draw from it startling and necessary  conclusions.  
I began by documenting the fact that in the New Testament there are a variety 
 of competing explanations as to how it was that God was thought to be 
uniquely  present in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. To establish this fact requires 
only  the simple act of reading the books of the New Testament in the historic 
order  in which they were written. Let me summarize briefly. Paul, who wrote 
between 50  and 64 CE, seems in his early epistles to have had no need to 
explain the power  he found in Jesus. He was content simply to proclaim it by 
saying ecstatically:  "God was in Christ." Paul made no effort to define what he 
meant either by the  word "God"" or by the word "Christ." God in the Jewish 
Scriptures was generally  thought of theistically, as an external supernatural 
being, who was capable of  miraculous acts of intervention. The word "Christ" 
actually derived from a Greek  attempt to translate the Hebrew word "maschiach," 
which literally meant "the  anointed one," and was originally a title for the 
Jewish king. When David's  royal line came to an end, "maschiach" evolved 
into the Jewish hope for a  messiah who would come at the end of time to 
inaugurate God's reign of justice  on earth. By the time Paul wrote, this messianic 
title had quite clearly been  applied to Jesus, giving us insight into the 
meaning his followers found in him.  When Paul used these words he was probably not 
conscious of any of these  assumptions. Ecstasy does not require 
explanations.  
Later, when Paul wrote to the Romans, he was in an explanatory mood. He had  
never been to Rome, and he wanted that community to provide him a base for his 
 missionary efforts to Spain. He thus sought to explain just what it was that 
he  believed about Jesus. His words were very primitive. God, he said, had  
"designated Jesus" to be "the Son of God" at "the time of the resurrection"  
(Rom.1:1-4). It was not a co-equal Trinitarian claim and by later standards  
would be called "heresy." God had the power to designate and Jesus was the  
passive designated one. The moment of this divine designation, Paul said, was  the 
resurrection which meant for Paul the lifting of the life of Jesus into the  
very being of God. By the time Mark wrote the first gospel, about 70 CE, the  
story of how God was related to Jesus had grown dramatically. Mark begins with  
the fully human Jesus coming to be baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan 
 River. When Jesus entered those waters, Mark said, the heavens opened and 
the  Spirit of God poured down to fill him. From that moment on his was a 
God-infused  life. The defining moment had moved from resurrection to baptism. When 
Matthew  in the mid-eighties and Luke some five to ten years later, expanded 
Mark into  two distinctively new gospels, both authors proclaimed that God had 
entered  Jesus' life by the action of the Holy Spirit at the moment of 
conception, giving  rise to the virgin birth story. The defining moment had now moved 
from  resurrection to baptism to conception. When the Fourth Gospel appeared 
at the  turn of the century, John proclaimed that Jesus was the enfleshment of 
the "Word  of God" first spoken at the dawn of creation. The defining moment 
had now  journeyed from resurrection to baptism to conception to creation.  
My point in this brief historical analysis is to demonstrate that even in the 
 earliest sources in the New Testament, attempts to explain the "God 
experience"  found in Jesus varied widely. There never was a single "orthodox" 
position.  Christology has always been evolving. Gradually over the years these 
diverse,  and sometimes mutually incompatible explanations, were harmonized by 
church  councils and crafted into creeds and dogmas that the Church then said must 
be  believed on pain of excommunication, torture and death. The Jesus 
experience  thus began to be smothered in the theological framework and power needs 
of  institutional religion.  
Every explanation reflects the explainer's subjectivity. There is no eternal  
explanation. When centuries passed and knowledge expanded, these hardened  
creedal explanations began to shake, to crack and finally to die. For those who  
had identified the explanation with the eternal experience, this created a  
spiritual crisis. One can neither artificially respirate lifeless forms nor  
twist 21st century minds into 1st century pretzels in order to be believers.  
That is the crisis that rips at my soul and has created in me both the  
tension and the motivation that finds expression in this book. If I am to remain  a 
Christian with integrity I must be able to lift Jesus out of the prison of  
yesterday's woefully inadequate words and separate him from the interpretive  
layers that now hide him from so many. When people ask if I have succeeded, I  
reply that time and my readers will determine that. If this book opens doors  
through which the alienated of today can walk into a new and living 
relationship  with God, then the book is a success. However, if I succeed in doing no 
more  than to disturb the static and increasingly hysterical faith of those who 
have  identified yesterday's traditional explanations with ultimate reality, 
making  them more eager to protect these forms at all costs, then the book is a 
failure.  Like a parent launching a child into a world the parent cannot 
control, I have  now launched this book. I wait both in anxiety and hope for a 
verdict.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Carol Ballantine from Mandeville, LA, writes  
When you were talking about secular humanism, you said nothing awaits a  
secular humanist. Were you referring to non-realism (God is not real) and the  
belief that this life is all the life we have? I suddenly thought of Don Cupitt.  
I like a lot of what he writes but absolutely cannot agree that God is not 
real  or that we have no future in God.  
Dear Carol,  
I do not think you have quoted me correctly. In the lectures in Mississippi,  
to which you are referring, I was saying that as Christianity becomes more  
traditional and fundamentalist, it becomes less and less appealing to thinking  
people who then see human secularism as their only option. My point was that  
both biblical literalism and secular humanism are, in my mind, dead end 
streets  in the sense that neither offers a way into a meaningful religious future. 
I am  certain that I will line up far closer to the secular humanists than I 
would to  the religious traditionalists. That is because the secular humanists 
and I live  in the same world, face the same issues and raise the same 
questions, while the  fundamentalists occupy some long passed century in most of 
their  presuppositions. The secular humanists and I, however, still differ 
dramatically  and completely in the content of our final commitment. I believe that 
once we  break open both our ideas about God and our understandings of who 
Christ is and  free them from the religious molds that have captured them in 
Christian history;  we can still present both God and Christ in such a way as to 
attract the secular  humanists into a realistic Christian future. I sought to 
do that in my book  entitled, "A New Christianity for New World."  
Don Cupitt has been a close friend and even a mentor to me for many years  
now. You will find more of his titles in the bibliography of my books than any  
other author. We have even debated our differences publicly at a gathering of  
the Jesus Seminar in Times Square, New York. I think his analysis of the 
crises  facing contemporary Christianity is the most brilliant and incisive I have 
ever  read. That analysis first appeared as a series of BBC TV documentaries, 
not  unlike the Bill Moyer's series with Joseph Campbell. These Cupitt 
presentations  were later turned into a book called, The Sea of Faith, published by 
the  BBC Publishing Company, I think in the year 1984.  
Don has written many books since The Sea of Faith, but all of them  assume 
the analysis developed in this monumental and groundbreaking work. Over  the 
course of these successive books he developed his concept of "Non-Realism."  He 
says that all God talk is conducted in a language that human beings have  
created and therefore all God talk is a human creation. With that I am in full  
agreement. He then concludes that God is, therefore, only the creation of human  
language and that there is no reality to which that language points. With that 
 conclusion I totally disagree. While I am certain that the word "God" is a 
human  attempt, in admittedly human language, to describe a human experience, I 
affirm  that the experience is real. We call the God experience "otherness,"  
"transcendence," or even "the holy." We recognize that this reality is not  
capable of being defined, but that inability does not make this experience  
unreal. I will not claim for my language or the language of the Bible, creeds or  
doctrines any sense of ultimacy, inerrancy or infallibility. I do believe,  
however, those words point to a reality that is transforming and  
consciousness-raising and that this reality invites me into having the courage  to be more 
than I have been before. So I stand before this undefined presence  that I 
call God, in awe and wonder. God is real to me. I create my definitions  of God, 
but I do not create the God experience. So I am theologically a  "Realist" not 
a "non-Realist." I still admire and profit from Don Cupitt's work  and I 
still claim him as a special friend.  
Thanks for your letter.  
John Shelby Spong 
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