[Dialogue] 8/11/11, Spong: The Lecture Tour of Germany, Part III: Marburg

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The Lecture Tour of Germany, Part III: Marburg
Our task and the agenda for the third day of our lecture tour of Germany was to go to the city of Marburg where the University of Marburg is located.  This was a particularly exciting opportunity for me because Rudolf Bultmann, the man I regard as the greatest New Testament scholar of the 21st century, had spent the bulk of his professional career teaching at the University of Marburg.  It was Bultmann who gave to the New Testament world the word “demythologize” which frightened traditional biblical literalists when it was first uttered, since they understood the word “myth” to mean something like a fairy tale and began to accuse Bultmann of saying that the Bible was a book of fairy tales.  Nothing could have been farther from Bultmann’s intention.
What Bultmann was saying was that every generation inevitably translates its “God” experience in terms of the world view operative at the time.  We can do no other. If we assume, for example, that the earth is the center of a three-tiered universe and define God as a being, external to our world, the location of God above the sky then becomes the context of our religious mythology.  When we have never heard of germs or viruses, coronary occlusions or cerebral accidents, tumors or leukemia, then we will almost of necessity understand sickness as the “punishment of the external deity, who lives above the sky.”  When we know nothing of the shift of tectonic plates beneath the surface of the earth or what happens to low pressure systems moving across warm ocean waters in the northern hemisphere summer, then we will explain earthquakes and hurricanes as the angry response of our external deity.  When we know nothing about either mental illnesses or epilepsy, then we explain those phenomena in terms of demon possession.  Our “mythology” thus shapes our explanations.
When the New Testament was written in the first century those “mythological” understandings were all but universal.  If you and I are going to understand that New Testament, then we must “demythologize” it, that is, we must remove the experience from the “mythology” of the first century and recast it in terms of the “mythology” of our time.  That was Bultmann’s incredible insight and, for those who had never conceived of any way to read the Bible except literally, he was an enormous challenge.
The theological seminary where I did the graduate work leading to my ordination in 1955 had not yet heard of Rudolf Bultmann.  Denominational schools are not generally on the academic cutting edge.  This institution was still rooted in the post World War I reaction led by Karl Barth to the theological liberalism of the 19th century that did not account for the evil experienced in that world conflict. Barth’s movement became known as “neo-orthodoxy.”  Because of this, I did not meet the gigantic figure of Rudolf Bultmann until much later in my career.  My seminary did, however, train me in the ground-breaking theological thinking of another German named Paul Tillich, while leaving me with a very dated understanding of the scriptures.  The pre-Bultmannian options were to remain a biblical fundamentalist and hope to be clever enough about it to escape notice or to reject all things fundamentalist, while having a vapid and empty liberalism to offer instead.  To illustrate those options, I could either believe that Jesus literally multiplied five leaves and two fish into a sufficient volume of food to feed “5,000 men” plus women and children with supplies left over to fill twelve baskets or I could dismiss the miraculous altogether and assume that the lad mentioned in that story, who had offered his lunch of five loaves and two fish, had so shamed the others that they brought out their hidden food supplies to share until there was ample food for all.  The former meant that I could still pretend I lived in a pre-Newtonian world in which miracle and magic still abounded, while the latter would be so ordinary as to cause one to wonder why the story was ever recorded.  I could either believe that Jesus defied the laws of nature and walked literally “on the water” as the fundamentalists insist or I could observe that the Greek preposition we have translated as “on” can also mean “along the side of” and that this apparently miraculous story really meant that Jesus walked alongside the water, which again is so ordinary that it would not have been noticed.  Bultmann provided me and a whole generation of students with a totally new approach and he thus helped me combine biblical scholarship with Tillich’s 20th century theology.  My own vocation of trying to recast the Christian faith in the language of the 21st century required both of these perspectives.  To repeat a note from the first of my columns on this German lecture tour, it was my friend and mentor, the English bishop, John A. T. Robinson, who first put together for me the biblical scholarship of Bultmann, the theology of Tillich and the courage and vision of Bonhoeffer, Germans all, to form the point of view that I came to represent.  He did this in his 1963 book entitled Honest to God.
As a perpetual student, I had just this past year devoured Bultmann’s powerful and massive commentary on the Fourth Gospel.  For our generation Bultmann has completely recast the biblical debate.  Pre-Bultmanian people simply do not understand the post-Bultmanian agenda.  So the idea that I would lecture in Marburg, where Bultmann had taught for more than 20 years was a personal thrill for me.
To make this Marburg visit even more special, I discovered that Tillich had also begun his career as a teaching assistant at the University of Marburg.  This meant that in this citadel of learning I could express my appreciation for these two gigantic professors.  Bultmann had died on July 30, 1956.  Tillich, who had escaped the Nazi regime to come to America, had a spectacular career at Union Seminary in New York City and Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, died in 1963.  To me, however, both have been esteemed colleagues of a lifetime.
The subject of the lecture in Marburg was how to develop a non-theistic understanding of God.  I am no longer able to make sense out of the traditional theistic definition of God as “a Being,” who exists somewhere external to this world, who is a supernatural power and who can come to our aid in time of need or in answer to our prayers.  I am therefore not a “theist” and the English language suggests the only alternative to being a theist is to be an atheist.  I am not an atheist either.  Indeed I have an overwhelming sense of the wonder and mystery of God, but few if any words with which to convey that conviction.
In this lecture I sought to root a non-theistic understanding of God in the universal expression of separation that I believe accompanied the birth of self-consciousness.  To be self-conscious is to view life from a center inside the self instead of seeing oneself as an undifferentiated part of nature.  Self-consciousness is the experience in which time is known as the medium in which we live; it is thus also the source of the chronic anxiety that grips all human life and in which we are forced  to view ourselves as mortals, who are destined to die.  No other living creature has to manage this much reality.  It is self-consciousness that creates the great divide between human beings and the world of nature, including the merely conscious but not self-conscious parts of nature.
Out of the anxiety, or as the Germans would say, out of the angst of self-consciousness we create religious systems designed to please the external deity as a part of our search to find security.  Religion is motivated to win divine approval so that God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  Thus religion, I now believe, represents a necessary stage in the childhood of our humanity, but one which we must inevitably outgrow when we finally stop playing parent-child games with God.  The next step in human development will come, I believe, when we dare to step into human maturity and begin to experience God as the life force, empowering us to live fully, the love force freeing us to love wastefully and the being of God – what Tillich called the Ground of Being – giving us the courage to be all that we can be.  It is in terms of this understanding of the God experience that I now understand and seek to communicate the Christ story.  I see Jesus not as the divine visitor, but as one who lived fully, who loved wastefully and who dared to be all that he could be and in this process opened us to who God is.  Jesus broke the boundaries that still keep us in childlike fear and dependency.  The Jesus I now see does not rescue me from a fall that never happened, even mythologically, but he is the one who calls me and empowers me to enter a new dimension of what it means to be human.  This God experience in Jesus invites me to step beyond tribe, gender, prejudice and even religion to be part of a universal consciousness.
One can only develop the bare outline of this approach in a single public lecture or indeed in a single column, but what I hoped to do in Marburg was to plant the seeds of a radical new theological reformation in the land of Luther, where the Reformation of the 16th century first gained its footing.
The German phase of this trip was now over and I headed to Scotland to engage in Glasgow the established Church of Scotland, which is a deeply conservative Presbyterianism.  To that story I will turn next week.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
David from Brisbane, Australia, writes:
Question:
This is a question I have been asked a number of times and I would love to know the answer.  You often mention that the gospels were written at different times and are able to quote the time line as to which gospel was written first, who copied off whom and approximately when and many other details. 

Can you tell me the background behind these insights?  I have had this discussion with several people and they immediately dismiss my assertions, but unfortunately I do not have the further information to continue the debate.  Was this new insight due to biblical study or was some of the original script subject to carbon dating?  I would love to know.
Answer:
Dear David, 

It would take a book to answer your question in any depth or detail, but let me try to do it briefly just to show you the parameters of the problem. Internal evidence drawn from the gospels themselves has to be combined with what we know about the external history of that region when the various books of the New Testament were written in order to provide the guide lines for their dating.  Mark’s gospel reveals, for example, in chapter 13 and in chapter 9 that it was written after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple since both appear to be referred to in those places.  We know from the study of Roman history that this fall and destruction occurred in 70 CE.  That was the year that the Roman army under a general named Titus destroyed the city and effectively ended the Jewish war. Some elements of the Jewish resistance movement retreated to a fortress named Masada and held out until 73 when that war finally came to an end. So we conclude that Mark has to have been written at some time after 70 CE. 

>From internal studies of Matthew and Luke we can ascertain that both are dependent on Mark. Matthew copies almost verbatim about 90% of Mark into his gospel; while Luke is a bit less dependent copying almost 50% of Mark into his gospel.  By the time Luke writes, the Gentile movement of the Church is well underway and we see that reflected in Luke’s text as well as in the book of Acts, which Luke wrote as Volume II of his two part work. There is some evidence to suggest that Luke also had Matthew to draw from when he wrote, but that is not universally agreed.  I think he did, but it would take far too long to make that case so I just file it as speculative.  So we make some conclusions based on these data and date Mark after the year 70 but probably no later that 72.  Matthew, who expands Mark in a more traditionally Jewish way, needs time to get Mark, work with Mark and to develop his own rather expansive interpretation of Mark.  So we think that would take some five to ten tears with the latter date more probable than the former because of the slowness of both transportation and communications and thus we date Matthew around the year 82.  Luke, who reveals a deeper separation of the Christians from the synagogue and who is writing for a more dispersed and Gentile-open community reflects a still later date and so we assign his gospel to a range of years between 88 and 92.  I tend to think of Luke’s gospel as coming near the late end of that range.  Only fundamentalists seem to challenge these conclusions and their literal approach to scripture requires that they date the books of the New Testament as early as possible in order to preserve their claim about their literal accuracy.  I have no need to defend that possibility and regard it as simply uninformed. There are no copies of the original texts in existence for us to carbon date.  Indeed we do not have any full manuscripts of New Testament books (we do have a few earlier fragments) that can be dated before the 6th century CE. 

I hope this helps to clarify the discussions you are having.  I send my regards to your heroic faith community whom I admire from afar in its ongoing struggle for authenticity and my special greeting and love to your family. 

~John Shelby Spong





Announcements
A Special Announcement from Bishop Spong’s Publisher
John Shelby Spong – John A. T. Robinson Lectureship Created in the UK
The Very Reverend Peter Francis, Warden and Dean of the Gladstone Library in Hawarden, United Kingdom recently announced the formation of an annual lectureship on progressive theology to begin in 2013.  This lectureship will be named the John Shelby Spong-John A. T. Robinson Lectureship, honoring two of the Anglican Communion’s best known progressive bishops.  Bishop Spong, who was elected a Fellow of the Gladstone Library by the Board of Trustees some years ago, has been a guest lecturer at the Library regularly over the last twelve years.  Bishop Robinson, who died in 1983 and who was Bishop Spong’s mentor and friend, has by the action of his family donated all of his extensive collection of personal and theological books to the Gladstone Library.  Other notable Church of England theologians who have placed their books in the care of this Library include Professor Don Cupitt of Cambridge University and Dr. Eric James, the official biographer of John A. T. Robinson.
The Gladstone Library has become a powerful force in the task of re-thinking Christianity for a new century and affirming the work of the Anglican Communion’s pioneer thinkers.
Funds to endow this lectureship will be solicited beginning in 2012.  With the announcement made at the end of Bishop Spong’s last conference there this summer a sum of 5000 pounds was raised in pledges from the conference attendees alone.
For further information contact Peter Francis, The Gladstone Library, St. Deiniol’s Church Lane, Hawarden, Flintshire CH5 3DF United Kingdom.
Further Announcements from the Publisher
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