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Loading...Yesterday I wrote a post in which I began to discuss the recent Huffington Post article from 2103 by John Shelby Spong in which he discusses his then new book on John; the book is called The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic.
Today I will finish out what I started to say yesterday.
Let me say again that I long appreciated Spong’s work and was sympathetic to his mission. He was trying to do from inside the church something very similar to what I’ve long tried to do outside of it: help educated lay people outside the field of biblical scholarship see what scholars – believers and non-believers alike – are saying about the New Testament.
Since Spong was operating within the church, however, and saw himself as a Christian,
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Kind of funny that many Christians refer to themselves as “born again” as that represents a MISunderstanding of what Jesus meant, following Nicodemus’s mistake! They should be calling themselves “born from above!”
Well stated, Bart.
Again, I will add some quotes from Spong, who held on to trying to ‘salvage’ the scriptures for modern Christians but, in his final years, pushed Universalism. (re: his final book ‘Unbelievable’)
There he quotes Chesterton’s “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” and reframes “Go make disciples of all nations” as “Go beyond the boundaries of your religion, your security system and your fears. Go to those whom your religious tradition has defined as unclean, uncircumcised, unsaved, unbaptized and unbelieving; those denounced as infidels, heretics, agnostics or atheists. Go beyond the barriers you have erected in your biologically driven search for survival.”
Spong also reframes language that refers to Jesus as the “Son of God” to mean that God was experienced as the Source of Life in the life of Jesus, the Source of Love in the love of Jesus and the Ground of Being in the being of Jesus. That the doorway to the divine is to become deeply and fully human!
His final mission statement was: “…the mission to which my mantra calls me is the task of building or transforming the world so that every person living will have a better opportunity to live fully, love wastefully and be all that each of them was created to be in the infinite variety of our humanity.” and he relates that back to the traditional process of ‘justification’ and sanctification.’
RIP Jack.
John’s Jesus’ words to Nicodemus do indeed mean that Jesus speaks truth, often in startling words which are revealing indeed, but not because they are literal statements
Reading this article, I felt somewhat disappointed with John Spong. It seems to me that he, too, interprets the written facts through a certain orientation. Although his direction differs from that of evangelical interpreters, both may share a similar tendency toward overinterpretation.
When I read the New Testament, I sense that these texts were written by educated people of their time, but not necessarily as fully systematic or internally consistent theological documents. The authors likely wrote with particular audiences, purposes, and situations in mind. Therefore, as later third-party readers, we may not be able to fully recover the intentions, nuances, or effects these writings had on their original readers.
For example, Paul must have written many letters over the course of his long ministry, yet only a limited number survive. Moreover, as human thinking changes over time, Paul’s own emphases may also have changed depending on the situation and period. I myself held very different views five years ago.
For this reason, I feel the difficulty of reconstructing a whole picture from fragmentary records. Perhaps this is not a rejection of historical inquiry, but a reminder of the limits of historical reconstruction.
A lot of problems would be solved if people just felt free to say, “I believe this part of the gospel, but not this other part.” Overwhelmingly, we try to make the gospels agree with our own ideas. We don’t feel free to accept one part and reject another. For many, this all or nothing attitude shuts us off from the parts of religion that might actually have been helpful to us. I would like to see people feel freer to take an a la carte approach. If somebody says you can’t do that, you don’t have to listen to them!
Bart, thanks for remembering Jack Spong.
His chapter on Jonah in “Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World” opened my eyes. Jack explains in very readable terms how the message of Jonah is that the one God must also be the God of my enemy and that I should not harm my enemy in the name of my God.
The gospels have Jesus remind us of the messages of Jonah on a number of occasions. Not only does Jesus mention Jonah directly, but there is also Jesus, like Jonah, asleep on a boat in the midst of a storm while others on the boat are terrified. There is a withered plant and there is Jesus in the belly of the Earth.
Fundamentalist Christians say that because Jesus knew about Jonah, Jonah’s story must be factal. But this does not do the story of Jonah justice. I think that the gospel authors, like Paul, were dealing with the problem of convincing people that this new faith in Christ was for all people – even your enemy. The world needs the message of Jonah today because people are still persecuting their enemies in the name of God.
But Christians’ “refusal to participate in public cult of the gods” has an economic underpinning (or at least an economic ingredient). Why did pagans care whether Christians participated in the public cult of the gods? Because the gods ran everything: e.g., if you don’t worship Ceres, she’ll get mad, and then you won’t get a good wheat harvest. So you (and everyone else in the community) better worship Ceres or suffer the consequences. In a year with a poor harvest, you look around for the reason why, namely those darn Christians who didn’t worship Ceres.