[Dialogue] Feb 7 Spong

[KroegerD at aol.com]

February 7, 2008 
Teaching at Drew Theological  Seminary in 2008  

I have just completed teaching a course at the Theological School of Drew  
University. The creative faculty at this respected institution has developed  
special opportunities in the month of January that allow students to have an  
intense and concentrated course taught by an outside lecturer that is designed  
to supplement and enrich their core curriculum. My class involved thirty-six  
hours of classroom teaching, conducted over three weeks. For full academic  
credit my students were required to do 1000 pages of supplementary reading and  
to produce a major paper of 3000 to 4500 words. The content of my class was 
the  person of Jesus. "Separating the Myth of Jesus from the Man of Nazareth" 
was its  title, and it was based on my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. About 
30  people enrolled in the course. Half of them were degree students seeking  
ordination in Methodist, Episcopal and Presbyterian traditions; the rest were  
lay people ranging in age from their forties to their seventies who were 
members  of local churches attending at Drew's invitation. This combination 
produced a  rich classroom experience.  
Class diversity was heightened by one other special dimension. Among the  
degree candidates were three students from Korea, one from China and one from  
Rwanda and Burundi. While their English language skills were remarkable, their  
presence made me newly aware of the difficulty we face when translating  
theological concepts that have been shaped by the Western mind and the Western  
consciousness into the mindset of the totally different cultures of Asia or  
Africa. Three of my books, for example, have been translated into Korean, but I  
have no knowledge of Korean whatsoever and, consequently, no idea whether these 
 translations are accurate either in style or content. My students must do 
this  work of translating every day. Teachers and authors alike live by faith 
that  they are communicating their ideas correctly.  
I treasured this teaching opportunity for several reasons. First, I wanted a  
chance to see who the students are training to be pastors and priests in the  
various denominational schools in the 21st century. What motivates them? Are  
they clinging to the past or open to the future? Second, I wanted to know 
what  the issues are that dominate discussion in theological schools today and 
whether  students are aware of current debates occurring in the formative 
centers of  academic Christianity. One way to accomplish this latter goal was to 
gauge the  response I would receive to the required reading. I provided a list of 
books to  be kept on reserve in the Drew library that would undergird this 
class. About  half of their required reading was specifically assigned, but the 
other 500  pages were to be their choice, but must be selected from the 
reserved reading  list. I thought long and hard about what books to include. It was 
not my task to  give them a balanced diet, the seminary would do that. I 
wanted to make sure  that they were introduced to those pivotal books that were 
helping to develop a  contemporary approach to Christianity. I was eager to make 
them familiar with  those authors who have helped the Christian Church move 
from an increasingly  irrelevant traditional orthodoxy to a view of God, Jesus 
and Christianity itself  that is capable of engaging the modern, post Christian 
and even post-religious  world. My choices, which were limited to about ten 
books, were in three  categories and were surprising even to me.  
I began with a massive work by David Friedrich Strauss, published in 1835 in  
Germany, entitled The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. This watershed  book 
actually served to introduce critical biblical scholarship to 19th century  
Europe. It is a volume that, in the edition I read, was over 1,000 pages long  
with extensive notes and in very tiny print. It took me a full year and great  
personal discipline to complete it. Strauss raised questions about the  
historicity of such things as the various miracles in the gospels, from Jesus  
walking on water to the Virgin Birth. Prior to Strauss' work these issues had  
been widely discussed only in academic circles, with none of it ever making it  
to the minds of the public or the average churchgoer. So the publication of 
this  book broke like a tidal wave across Europe. Strauss was at that time a 27 
year  old New Testament Lecturer at the University of Tubingen. Despite his 
brilliance  and obvious world class academic credentials, he was fired from his 
post as a  result of the outcry that greeted his work. He was never again hired 
by any  European institution of higher learning. Most of the insights in that 
book are  today all but universally accepted, but in 1835 they seemed to 
challenge both  the common wisdom and the faith of the people. Translated into 
English in 1845  by the free thinking rebel who hid her female identity under the 
pen name of  George Eliot, the rumble of this book has continued to be heard 
through the  centuries. I do not believe it possible to understand the debate 
that goes on to  this day inside Churches between the "literalists" and the 
"revisionists"  without being aware that David Friedrich Strauss both initiated 
and framed that  debate. I did not expect my students to read this entire book 
because it would  demand a time commitment that a three week course could not 
appropriately  require, but I did want them to be aware of it, to taste it 
and to understand  just why it is that this debate is still raging.  
In my second category were two works by my own mentor and friend, John A. T.  
Robinson, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich in the U. K., who shook up the  
ecclesiastical structures in the 1960's with a small book of less than 140 pages  
that enabled Christianity to escape churches and theological colleges and to 
be  debated in pubs, taxis, bars, social gatherings and even golf fairways.  
Robinson's book, Honest to God, came out in 1963. Loudly condemned in  
ecclesiastical circles, Robinson was not fired from his ecclesiastical position,  but 
he was marginalized, as the Church of England regularly does to its creative  
thinkers. A University Lecturer in New Testament at Cambridge prior to his  
appointment as an area bishop, Robinson was never promoted to be a diocesan  
bishop and was effectively ostracized in Church circles. The task of his book  
was to bring to public awareness three highly respected Christian thinkers:  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. Each of these scholars  
had won places of honor and influence in the Christian Academy, but very little  
of their thought had reached the minds of the average Christian. Robinson put 
an  end to what some have called "the conspiracy of silence." Fanned by scare 
 headlines in the English press such as "Our Image of God Has Got to Go!" the 
 debate raged across the U.K. Honest to God sold millions of copies, more  
than any religious book since Pilgrim's Progress. Translated into almost  every 
language in the world it succeeded, as few books have ever done, in  
initiating world wide theological debate among Christians. Robinson was clearly  
Strauss' heir and the father of much of the critical biblical scholarship of our  
day. To Honest To God I also added Robinson's scholarly Christological  work 
that is still my favorite of all his books The Human Face of God.  
My third category was a series of books from the leaders of the Jesus  
Seminar, that national organization of scholars that in our generation has put  
biblical scholarship onto the front pages of our newspapers and garnered for  
itself the hostile reaction of threatened fundamentalists. Theologians on the  
conservative Catholic side, like Luke Timothy Johnson of Atlanta, and on the  
Protestant Evangelical side, like N. T. (Tom) Wright in England, have been  
apoplectic in their attacks on the Jesus Seminar. In this category I recommended  
books by the Seminar founder, Robert Funk, and the two most popular New  
Testament authors, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg. Members of this class  were 
not required to read everything in this reading list, but if they are going  
to understand the current debate in Christianity, some knowledge of these 
major  transition points is absolutely essential.  
My only way of assessing how much my students had taken advantage of this  
reading list, and, indeed, how well they had listened to and followed the  
lectures came in their final papers. The assignment was to write on the question  
framed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "Who is Christ for me today and why?" It was for 
 Bonhoeffer, and I hoped it would be for my students, a powerfully 
existential  question, combining research and personal conviction. These papers were to 
give  evidence that they had interacted with both the assigned reading and the 
 lectures. I looked forward to reading these papers personally. I was not  
disappointed.  
Most of these future clergy revealed not only their intellectual brilliance,  
but also deep understanding and rare insight. They wrestled honestly and  
personally with the conflict that they seem to face daily inside their  
traditional ecclesiastical institutions. Their scholarship has led them to  conclusions 
that are different from what they are told they must believe in  order to be 
ordained. They are not willing to be dishonest and at the same time  they did 
not think they are being faithless. I found myself deeply encouraged by  their 
openness.  
A basic dishonesty is present in the Christian church today. Scholarship is  
not encouraged if it erodes traditional belief. Many a denominational school 
has  sacrificed the need to educate, replacing it with the need to 
propagandize.  There is enormous fear in the pews that what people have been taught to 
believe  as the very essence of Christianity is no longer either convincing or  
believable. When they do not see an alternative, they both cling hysterically 
to  the formulas of the past and become uncritical fundamentalists or they 
simply  abandon the Christian church as no longer relevant to their lives.  
My sense is that New Jersey's Drew Theological Seminary is not caught in that 
 trap. Its leaders have made a self-conscious decision to engage the 
theological  task in the 21st Century in a significant and creative way. My students  
certainly reflected that. I salute them.  
JSS  
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Diana, from North Carolina, writes:  
Since the Bible contains so much misinterpreted information, what kind of  
reference should a praying, spiritual person use? Are there certain translations 
 that are less derogatory than others? Also, in looking at a deeper and 
clearer  understanding of the Bible, are there metaphysical understandings that 
would  enhance one's spiritual journey and that would be useful? If so, what are 
they?  
Dear Diana,  
Part of the problem that underlies your letter is that in your mind and in  
the minds of countless millions of others like you, a distorted Bible and a  
distorted understanding of the Bible has shaped your life for far too long. To  
undo that damage would almost take a lifetime. Some translations of the Bible  
are certainly more accurate than others, but any honest translation of the 
Bible  will still confront the reader in many passages with an understanding of 
God who  acts in an immoral way. That is simply part of the tribal story the 
Bible tells.  Tribal gods have chosen people, which of course means that those 
not of that  tribe are God's unchosen. Tribal gods hate the enemies of the 
chosen people. So  the God of the Bible conducts a reign of terror against the 
Egyptians with  plagues, against the Ammonites by stopping the sun in the sky to 
allow Joshua  more daylight in which to slaughter them and even orders King 
Saul to commit  genocide against the Amalekites. No version of the Bible can 
remove the horrors  of some of its stories. That, however, is not the way to 
read this book. It is  not the word of God in any literal sense.  
The Bible is a developing narrative, portraying the developing  
God-consciousness in human life. It moves beyond the tribal deity of some of its  earlier 
parts to a universalism that defines God as both Love and Justice, and  even 
calls us to love our enemies. The essential truths of the Bible, useful on  all 
of our spiritual journeys, is that in creation God proclaims that all life  is 
holy, in the Jesus story, the Bible asserts that all life is loved and that  
through the Holy Spirit, who is said to be "the Lord and giver of life," the  
Bible issues a call to each of us to be all that we can be.  
I work on these primary premises of the Christian story, and that is why I  
still treasure, read, study and try to live into what I believe is the 
essential  truth of the Bible. I do this by rejecting everything that is present in 
either  the Christian Church or the Christian Scriptures that is used to 
diminish the  humanity of any child of God, based on any external characteristic of 
tribe,  gender, sexual orientation or religious tradition. I invite you to walk 
with me  into this new perspective.  
John Shelby Spong 



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