[Dialogue] 4-22-09, Spong: Why I Am Not a Unitarian

Thu Apr 23 15:00:13 EDT 2009

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Thursday April 23, 2009 

Why I Am Not a Unitarian

Some years ago, while I was delivering a series of Lenten lectures in St. Peter's Church in Morristown, New Jersey, a lay woman asked me a pointed and provocative question: "How is what you say about Jesus different from what the Unitarians say?" 
Her question was not leveled as a charge, as it is so often in conservative religious circles. This person was not defensive about some dogma she did not understand. She was eager to be honest about what she believed and to seek truth no matter where it took her. She had no intention of being anything other than an active member of the Episcopal Church, yet, when she articulated her understanding of Jesus, she tended to do so in relatively modern, non-traditional terms that she could embrace. She avoided complicated jargon. For this woman, Jesus was a good man, an outstanding teacher, a God-like example and even a human icon of God. Nothing else made much sense to her. 

She had been a member of her church long enough to be familiar with such classical theological terms as "Incarnation" and the doctrine of "The Holy Trinity." For her these terms were like church furniture — monuments in place around which one walked with respect. They did not demand to be understood nor did the
y require more than a pious salute. The Unitarian Church had no special appeal for her, yet deep in her heart she knew that her view of Jesus was more in line with what she had heard the Unitarian tradition espoused than it was reflective of classical Christianity. She hid these thoughts within herself as unworthy of much energy until she came to this lecture series. The things she heard me saying gave her the courage to ask her question openly. To her ears, I seemed to be defining Jesus in similar, human-sounding categories. It was for her, she said later, a freeing experience. 

Her question came during the third and final lecture of this Lenten series. In these three presentations I had been trying to recast for a contemporary audience the most ancient symbols through which the meaning of the post-Easter Jesus had been articulated and understood before the onset of creeds. Since the first Christians were all Jews, it was inevitable that their original interpretive symbols would grow out of the worship life and history of the Jewish people. 

These first generation Christians looked at Jesus through Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when the sacrificial lamb was offered for the sins of the people. They also understood Jesus as the Paschal Lamb of the Passover celebration, slain to spare Jewish homes from a visit by the angel of death. The Jewish families celebrated their redemption and freedom by reenacting annually these two sacrifices: the lamb of Yom Kippur and the lamb of Passover. In time th
ese two images created a lens through which they began to look at Jesus. The death of Jesus thus came to be seen as analogous to the deaths of these two sacrificed lambs, the one creating atonement and the other breaking the power of death. That was why Jesus began to be called "The Lamb of God." 

This imagery dominated that book we call the Epistle to the Hebrews. The popular evangelical phrase, "Jesus died for my sins," also arose directly out of these original interpretations of the cross. Other early Jewish images appeared in Christian history and were incorporated into the church's growing understanding of Jesus. There was the "servant of the Lord" image, drawn from II Isaiah; the "shepherd king" image, drawn from II Zechariah; and the "Son of Man" image, drawn from the writings of Daniel. 

As I isolated and developed each of these images in my lectures, my audience could begin to see how the early supernatural interpretations, so prevalent in first century Judaism, began to fasten themselves onto the life of Jesus of Nazareth. This was the context in which the question about a Unitarian understanding of Jesus was asked. 

I was startled to hear myself saying in response to her question words that sounded harsh, even judgmental — "Oh, I could never be a Unitarian!" — because I meant no disrespect for that religious tradition, which I greatly admire. The Unitarian Fellowship has put the more traditional forms of Christianity to shame with its consistent social witness for justice20for all of God's people. Unitarians have championed the causes of racial and gender equality. They advocated for and protected gay and lesbian groups long before other Christian bodies were willing to do so. They have maintained intellectual credibility by their ability to be open to evolving religious truth. Unitarianism actually came into existence as a response to the explosion of knowledge growing out of the enlightenment, while mainline Christian bodies could do no better than fight a slow and costly rear-guard retreat in the vain defense of a biblical or creedal literalism. With a full knowledge of and a deep appreciation for these aspects of Unitarianism, what was there in me that caused me to maintain so quickly, and even a bit adamantly, that I could never be a Unitarian? If that were not negative then I clearly needed to put some content into that statement because it sounded negative. Allow me now to do so. 

I see myself as a part of a long historical tradition from which I do not seek release. That tradition means that I must walk in the company of Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, Irenaeus, Origin, Augustine, Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, Whitehead, Tillich, Kung, Ruether, Fiorenza, John Robinson and James Pike, just to name a few of those who have built that tradition. Those heroic, spiritual ancestors of mine created tension within Christianity and wrestled openly with its substance. Their goal was to enable their faith tradition and their Christ to be 
heard through the ages in new accents and in contemporary thought forms. These leaders lived in that stretching between a particular pathway of faith received in a particular historical context and the ever-changing understanding of that faith that was required as the years and the centuries rolled by and as the human context changed dramatically. The temptation in all religion is to freeze the faith story in some literal and time-bound form and then to make ultimate claims for that interpretation. 

Unitarians bear witness to today, and when the frozen religious literalism of the past becomes intolerable they feel free to walk away from it. When they find that they can no longer translate with meaning such traditional doctrines as the Incarnation, the Atonement and the Trinity they feel free to abandon them. In particular the Unitarian tradition found the unity of God compromised by the rigid attempt to define God as Trinity. They were told that these issues were settled and that there was no further room for debate. Unable to worship God with their minds, they decided to leave. That was a valid choice, but it is not my choice. I, like them, do not want to be part of a Christianity that fails to make room for those who need to probe intellectually and spiritually the creedal formulas of yesterday, but by rejecting the literalized concepts of the previous generation they also seemed to me to reject the experience that compelled those people to articulate their religious words in the first place. That meant
 that the tension of theological debate disappears and almost inevitably they become wedded to their own time in history. When one marries the present one quickly becomes widowed. 

Every Christian generation must sing the Lord's song in the accents of its day and inside the bounds of knowledge available in its generation. For that song to have depth and intensity, however, it must be sung in tension and harmony, not with the words of the past, but with the experience of the past. I feel no great need to preserve the words of my religious past, but I never want to reject the experience of the past that caused the words of my faith story to come into being. 

As a Christian I seek to separate the experience of God, which I regard as eternal, from the traditional words used to explain that experience, which I always regard as time bound and transitory. When I reject the traditional interpretation I do not reject the experience that I am certain created the interpretive words. I must, as Solomon did when he built the Temple, take the treasures of the past into the new temple with me. I refuse to turn away either from the hard questions of my day or to ignore the classical Christian symbols of the past. I will wrestle with the scriptures, but I will never abandon the scriptures. I will seek to break open the creeds, but I will never reject the creeds. I will fight with doctrines like Incarnation and the Trinity, but I will never dismiss the truth that people were pointing to when20these doctrines were first formed. It would, therefore, be too easy for me to be a Unitarian. The grist for my mill would be removed. It is by living in the tension between the past and the future that my Christian life is formed. I could not abandon that struggle. I walk a fine theological line. I see it as necessary to enable me to "sing the Lord's song in the strange land" of the 21st century. I can appreciate my Unitarian friends who do not want to be bothered by ideas that make little sense today, but I could not be me if I were not caught between the experience of the past and the articulation of that experience in the words and concepts of today. I hope this makes sense. Unitarians are almost always my allies in the theological struggles of my generation, but my vocation makes me go in another direction. 

– John Shelby Spong 

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Desi,via the Internet, writes, 
What is this about Jesus leaving the area entirely and going to India and all over the world (Aquarius Bible)? I keep hearing these stories about Jesus traveling all over the world and then he comes back to his home in Bethlehem or Galilee to do his ministry after his travels. Also, what are these stories about his childhood? Now that I am reading your book, I think the stories are false, and I have heard LOTs of stories. However, I would like to have your comments. The stories are always in the vein of miracles and other20supernatural things that they say were attributed to him as a child. I don't think this is factual or history. May I have your comments? What about his being married to Mary Magdalene — the basis of The Da Vinci Code? Any credence in that?

Dear Desi,

My first bit of advice to you is to read the Bible itself, not things like the Aquarius Bible. There is nothing in the biblical tradition and no data anywhere else about Jesus traveling to India or any other place. That is out of the pure imagination of some human being. It makes good fiction. It is not good history.

Second, there is only one childhood story in the Bible. You will find it at the end of the second chapter of Luke. It has to do with a trip to Jerusalem with his parents when Jesus was twelve. It was a familiar form of a hero story in that it provides insight into the childhood of the hero that presages his or her extraordinary life in adulthood. The boy Jesus in this story amazes his elders with his knowledge, which the reader is led to suppose comes from a supernatural source within him. He also lays claim to a special relationship with God when he refers to the Temple as "my Father's house." There is, however, no history in this story either, even if it is in the Bible. Luke alone introduces this story (and that not until the late 9th or early 10th decade of the Christian era) and Luke alone mentions it. He bases it on an earlier Samuel story and uses it to serve his interpretive=2
0purposes. Luke did not regard it as history.

While I do not think it can be proved, I do think it is possible to build a case from clues in biblical sources themselves for the fact that Jesus and Magdalene were married. I sought to do that in my book Born of a Woman. At the very least I believe we can establish the fact that Magdalene was very close to Jesus and deeply involved in, indeed the primary woman of, the Jesus movement. It is nonetheless highly speculative. Dan Brown is thus not completely out of touch with history when he makes that a key element in his book The Da Vinci Code. The rest of The Da Vinci Code is pure fantasy — very well written and exciting fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. There is no story of Jesus ever living in Bethlehem except in Matthew's birth story. Matthew then has to develop a story to get him to move to Nazareth, where all of the other gospel writers assume he lived. Even Luke asserts that he lived in Nazareth but was forced by an edict from the emperor to go to Bethlehem so that messiah could be born in David's city and thus lay claim to be the heir to David's throne. Yet all of the gospels refer to him as "Jesus of Nazareth." 

Read the Bible itself if you want to know the early Christian tradition is. You will not find it in the Aquarius Bible. Read Dan Brown for good fiction. He is a terrific storyteller. But don't read either for biblical facts or for history.

– John Shelby Spong

0A

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