[Dialogue] Spong 10/31/07 2nd coming

[KroegerD at aol.com]

October 31, 2007 
The Fifth Fundamental The  Second Coming  

The last of the Five Fundamentals claimed by American Protestant  
Traditionalists as the irreducible essence of Christianity has to do with the  second 
coming of Jesus. To modern ears it is the most bizarre of the five and is  based, 
I believe, on a misunderstanding of the Christ experience that was later  
literalized. However, that misunderstanding has found a place in the gospels  
themselves, and so the distortion echoes through the ages. This fifth  
fundamental stated that Christians are required to believe that Jesus will  return to 
the earth in a bodily form on the last day for two purposes. He will  come, 
first to inaugurate the Kingdom of God and second to carry out the final  
judgment. This ancient concept involved pictorial images of Jesus coming  physically 
out of the sky, which made sense only in a pre-Copernican world. It  forces 
contemporary believers to affirm the literalness of a place called  heaven, where 
great and eternal rewards are handed out and of a place called  hell where 
great and eternal punishment must be endured. It also implies that  the "Day of 
Judgment" has to be regarded as an event that will occur inside  history at 
the end of time. For most modern people all of these concepts fall  somewhere in 
between gobbledygook and complete non-sense. That is at least part  of the 
reason why there is in our time a rush into secularism and why our modern  world 
produces popular books espousing atheism. Yet, the fact remains that even  in 
this generation those who predict the specific date for the second coming of  
Jesus still get media attention - though maybe only the kind of attention 
that  one gives to the theater of the absurd. Occasionally, some person will 
actually  claim that they are in fact the Jesus who will come again. The last one 
of these  to gain major attention in the media was from Texas - enough said. 
Devotees of  the second coming quote the Bible literally to justify their 
convictions.  Perhaps we ought to start by looking at these biblical ideas.  
Apocalypticism, or concern with the end of the world, is indeed a note found  
first in the Hebrew Scriptures and later in Paul and the gospels. 
Apocalypticism  appears to enter this tradition as a sign of the decline of hope among 
the  Jewish people that their vindication would ever occur inside history. That  
despair was born after the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel 
in  721 B.C.E. That defeat for the Jews dispersed the citizens of the 
Northern  Kingdom into the DNA pools of the Middle East, never to be isolated, 
identified  or heard of again. These people are referred to today as "The Ten Lost 
Tribes of  Israel." The Assyrians also reduced the last remaining Jewish state 
called Judah  to vassal status and inaugurated a policy of collecting tribute, 
which left the  Jews in poverty and allowed hopelessness to become their 
daily bread. It was out  of that hopelessness that the Jews began both to dream of 
God's restoration and  to envision exactly what would occur at the end of 
history when the Kingdom of  God would be established. Apocalypticism also fed 
the messianic dreams of the  Jews, for one aspect of the messiah who would come, 
was that he would  reestablish the Jewish nation, restore the Jewish throne 
and usher in the  Kingdom of God at the end of time.  
These hopes grew in direct proportion to the rise of Jewish despair. After  
vassalage to the Assyrians, the Kingdom of Judah was defeated and destroyed by  
the new power of the Middle East, the Babylonians. This time Judah tried to 
hold  out against this foe, fighting a brilliant defensive battle for two years 
before  the walls around Jerusalem were breached and the victorious 
Babylonians poured  in. The city was laid to waste, the Temple destroyed and all the 
able bodied  citizens were deported to exile in Babylon never to see their holy 
land again.  Some two generations later, the Persians overran the Babylonians 
and let the  captive people finally return to their homeland, where they 
discovered that the  nation of Judah was little more than a rock pile and that 
Jerusalem was so  crippled that it would never again inspire grand dreams. In that 
climate  apocalyptic thinking thrived. Someday messiah will come, they said, 
and draw  history to a close. Messiah will usher in the Kingdom of God, judge 
the people  of the world and begin the time after time and beyond history when 
God's will is  done "on earth as in heaven."  
It was not long, however, before the Persians were overrun by the Macedonians 
 and the Jews became again a conquered province now in the empire of 
Alexander  the Great. Upon Alexander's death, the Jewish state became a pawn between 
the  Syrians and the Egyptians until Rome's might once again united that part 
of the  world under Roman domination. So when the Jews looked at history they 
saw it  only as an arena of their constant victimization. In response they 
created  apocalyptic fantasies that anticipated the end of the world. In that 
alone they  found both comfort and hope. The promised one, they said, would 
descend out of  the sky at the end of time and usher in the new age of peace under 
the dominance  of these oppressed people. Many definitions floated around the 
idea of messiah  in Jewish circles. He would be the Son of David, and thus the 
heir to David's  throne. He would be the new Moses and the new Elijah, the Son 
of Man and even  the Son of God. Much of the gospel material in the New 
Testament was designed,  not to describe things Jesus actually said and did, but to 
attach various images  to him in order to demonstrate his claim to be the 
messiah. They believed that  when messiah came he would be recognized because the 
signs of the kingdom would  be the marks of his life: the blind would see, 
the deaf hear, the lame walk and  the mute sing. When Jesus was identified by 
his disciples as the messiah all of  these images were attached to his memory. 
When Matthew attributed to him the  parable of the Judgment in which the sheep 
and the goats were separated and  dispatched, one to eternal life, the other 
to outer darkness, messianic thinking  was clearly operative.  
Messiah would come out of the sky because that is where God lived. The "City  
of God" would descend out of heaven; living water would flow from above when 
the  Kingdom dawned. All of these images assumed a three-tiered universe with 
heaven,  the abode of God, just above the sky. Christianity's incarnational 
language  reflected that mentality. Jesus was the human form of God above, 
entering human  history through a miraculous virgin birth. His life was filled with 
Godlike acts  and people said that he was destined to return to the God above 
the sky through  the miracle of a cosmic ascension. Those were the 
interpretive symbols used to  tell the Christ story. Interestingly enough, however, 
these traditional story  lines do not appear to be original to Christianity. The 
Virgin birth, for  example, did not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th 
decade. Paul who  wrote between 50-64 had clearly never heard of it. Neither 
had Mark, the first  gospel, written in the early years of the 8th decade. The 
story of Jesus'  ascension, as something separate from the resurrection, is a 
10th decade  addition to the Christian story and try as we may, we find no 
evidence of  miracles being associated with Jesus until the 8th decade.  
Something occurred, an experience that cannot be described, causing the  
disciples to identify Jesus with that promised messiah and immediately these  "end 
of the world" images were wrapped around him, It quickly became obvious,  
however, that neither the life nor the death of Jesus had established the  
Kingdom of God. So echoes in the teaching of Jesus appeared suggesting that he  
would come again to complete the messianic task before "this generation has  
passed away." He was called the "first fruits of the Kingdom of God." A crisis  
developed in the church at Thessalonica when Jesus did not return immediately  
and Paul had to address this anxiety in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians.  
Two thousand years have now passed and the Kingdom has not yet dawned.  
Increasingly most people just assume that this was a misunderstanding that got  
incorporated into Jesus. In Luke's gospel and in his second volume that we call  
the book of Acts, it begins to look like the hope for the second coming has  
already been replaced by the idea that the church has the universal mission to  
convert the world. Some have suggested that the coming of the Holy Spirit at  
Pentecost was really the second coming and that the church, presumably born 
in  that Pentecost experience, was now the "Body of Christ." That idea 
transforms  the second coming symbol somewhat.  
Others have said that Christ's second coming is in the lives of his faithful  
disciples, our commitment to live the Christ life. These explanations may be  
helpful to some but they are not to me. Neither are they to those almost to 
be  pitied people, who fail to live now because they spend their lives getting 
ready  to welcome Jesus in his second coming.  
All of the apocalyptic language, out of which talk of a second coming of  
Jesus arises, is mythological language expressing hope that is not bound by the  
pain of this world. It was never meant to be literalized. The classical  
fundamentalists, who wrote the Five Fundamentals of Christianity, are thus not  the 
true interpreters of the Christ story but the ones, who by literalizing the  
interpretive myths have actually falsified the Christ experience so totally 
that  21st century people find it increasingly difficult to call themselves 
Christian.   
So our analysis of the Five Fundamentals of Christianity is now complete.  
Every single one of them is intellectually bankrupt in the light of modern  
knowledge. The Bible is not the inerrant word of God. The Virgin Birth has  
nothing to do with biology. The idea of substitutionary atonement is a barbaric  
idea that makes God an ogre, Jesus a victim and you and me the guilt-ridden  
causes of Jesus' death. The resurrection of Jesus is not a physical, bodily  
resuscitation. The second coming is nothing more than a mythological way to  
express the human yearning for fulfillment. It has nothing to do with an event  that 
might occur in time.  
So what is Christianity all about if none of these "fundamentals" are  
literally true? That will be my topic next week.  
John Shelby Spong  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Alan Lee, via the Internet, writes:  
I have been a subscriber to your weekly newsletter for some time. I sincerely 
 appreciate your opening up an entirely different interpretation of biblical  
events, making it possible for a person to question the literal view without  
feeling like an evil person. I have certainly gained important insights into 
the  Bible and learned much about what doesn't make sense in the literal  
interpretations. Of your several books, which do you feel would be the most  
helpful and informative to read if I am primarily looking for your view on what  
the Bible and Christianity mean when they are stripped of the literal  
interpretations?  
Dear Alan,  
The Bible has been used for centuries by Christians as a weapon of control.  
To read it literally is to believe in a three-tiered universe, to condone  
slavery, to treat women as inferior creatures, to believe that sickness is  
caused by God's punishment and that mental disease and epilepsy are caused by  
demonic possession. When someone tells me that they believe the Bible is the  
"literal and inerrant word of God," I always ask, "Have you ever read it?"  
I work on the Bible constantly. The two books I recommend to you are  
Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, a survey of the entire Bible  from Genesis to 
Revelation, and The Sins of Scripture, in which I  looked at the way the 
Bible has been used throughout history to support  prejudice, to create 
stereotypes, to justify war, environmental degradation and  a host of other evils. A 
literally understood Bible has been the source of great  evil. I think we should 
recognize that and state it clearly.  
John Shelby Spong 



************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20071101/c13774d5/attachment-0001.html