[Dialogue] 7/24/4, Spong: Introducing Jesus for the Non-Religious to France

Thu Jul 24 07:37:37 PDT 2014

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Introducing Jesus for the
Non-Religious to France
(The following is the speech delivered in Paris at the launching of the French Translation of Jesus for the Non-Religious.)
How can those of us living in the 21st century understand the Jesus of history? We think very differently from the way the people who wrote the New Testament in the first century thought. Can we any longer believe, for example, that when Jesus entered this world his arrival was announced by a star that appeared newly in the heavens or that his birth was heralded by angels breaking through the midnight sky to sing to hillside shepherds? Can we, who both understand genetics and know that women have an egg-cell, still believe that his mother was a virgin and his father the Holy Spirit? At his baptism in the Jordan River can we still suggest that the heavens opened in the roof of the three-tiered universe and the spirit descended onto Jesus with the voice of God proclaiming him “My son”? Is it still possible for us to believe that a real devil tempted him in a literal wilderness? Can we still imagine that he actually preached the Sermon on the Mount with its eight symmetrical Beatitudes or that he fed 5000 people with just five loaves and two fish? Can 2lst century minds still embrace a Jesus who raised from the dead a child, a widow’s son and Lazarus, whose flesh was already decaying? Is it possible that Jesus did walk on water or still a storm? Can we really believe that he gave sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, the ability to leap to the lame and crippled and the capacity to speak to those who were mute? Can we believe that on the third day after his death, his resuscitated body walked out of a grave? Do any of us still believe the story that he defied gravity and rose into the sky or that, once ensconced in heaven, he sent the Holy Spirit on his followers in the great moment at Pentecost?
I have in my career and in my writing answered all these questions with a resounding “No.” Can I then still call myself a Christian? If none of these narratives from the biblical story can still be thought of as literally true, does my claim still to be a deeply committed, believing Christian have either integrity or credibility? Is my life some kind of self-deceptive lie?
The fact is that I not only identify myself as a Christian, but I have also served my church for twenty-one years as a priest and for twenty-four years as one of its chosen bishops. In my retirement today I remain an active member of my parish church, engaging in worship every Sunday. My wife sits on its governing body. I teach an Adult Bible Class in that church on a number of Sundays each year. I am also one of America’s best-known and best-selling religious authors, whose books have not only sold well over a million copies, but have been translated into every major European language as well as Korean and Arabic.
How is it possible, some might ask of me, to hold these two things together? How deeply can one challenge the literal understanding of what many people think of as the core, the basic tenets of historical Christianity and still consider himself or herself a believing, practicing Christian? To hold the tension between these two realities was the purpose I had in mind when I wrote the book Jesus for the Non-Religious, which has just this month been translated into French and is being now launched in a series of public events in Paris. This book was translated by an eminent scholar, Ray Rakower, who is fluent not only in French, but also in German and English. He also happens to be a friend of mine.
In this book I seek to demonstrate that there is a way both to read the Bible and to understand the Christian faith that is quite different from the way we have been traditionally taught. I do not think, for example, that we have to pretend that the Bible was ever written to be read as literal history. I believe that I can demonstrate that the original authors of the four gospels did not themselves believe that. The Bible, including what we Christians call the New Testament, is, rather, a deeply Jewish book, written by Jewish authors, attempting to interpret the power they had experienced in a Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth. Whatever they understood by the word “God,” they believed they had met in the person of Jesus. This connection between God and Jesus was first made by St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, written about the year 54 CE, when he stated: “God was in Christ.” That claim would, in time, become the essential center of the Christian faith, which I continue to affirm. How that experience is to be explained is still the pressing issue driving Christian theology to this day.
In the book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, I go through the familiar biblical stories about Jesus: his birth, his baptism, his temptation, his teaching, his miracles, his crucifixion and his resurrection in order to show that there is a new way to read these narratives, besides thinking of them as literal history. Can they be true and still not literal? I am convinced they can be. Can they point to a God that they cannot define and still be true? I believe they can. Can the stories of the resurrection of Jesus be real and yet not be stories of a deceased body literally walking out of a tomb? I am certain they can be. Can I still believe in the ultimate Christian promise of life after death while dismissing the concepts of heaven and hell as little more than institutional behavior-controlling techniques? I, in fact, do so believe and have written a book to demonstrate that entitled: Eternal Life: A New Vision – Beyond Religion – Beyond Theism – Beyond Heaven and Hell. Can I help others through my writing to get beneath the literal words of both the first century New Testament and the dated concepts of the Fourth Century creeds and still continue to affirm the transcendent experience to which these words point? Not only do I think that I can, but I also believe that this is exactly the purpose for which I wrote Jesus for the Non-Religious.
I cannot, however, in this brief address carry my audience through each of the steps which I have taken to bring me to these conclusions. In the book that task took me over 300 pages. What I can do, however, is to give you my conclusions briefly and then challenge you to read the process through which I journeyed to reach those conclusions. I suspect these conclusions will disturb the voices of traditional Christian spokespersons, who seem to think that faith can come only from believing dated and largely unbelievable literal concepts. I regret that they will be disturbed by my words, but let me be clear that is not my intention, nor are these people the audience I seek to reach. I write, rather, for those people who have engaged the knowledge revolution in science over the last 600 years and for those who are not afraid of the current modern understanding of the Bible, which has been developed in the last 200-500 years. I write for those who have long ago dismissed traditional Christianity as simply irrelevant in the modern world. I write to open to them radically new Christian possibilities. I write to invite them to take a second look at the faith of their fathers and mothers, which they have today largely rejected and to begin to see something in Christianity that they have never seen before.
The fact is that I do believe in God deeply and profoundly, but I cannot tell you either who God is or what God is. Nor do I think that anyone else can do so either. All any of us can ever do is to tell others how we believe we have experienced God. God and our experience of God are not the same. All human experience is subjective and may, therefore, be delusional. Some will surely assert that such is the case with me, but I do not think that they are correct. So let me lay before you briefly the content of my “God experience” and let you do with it what you will, including judging it as inadequate.
I believe that I experience God as the “Source of Life,” which while flowing through the universe, only comes to self-consciousness in human beings. If God is the Source of Life then I must worship God by my willingness to live, to live fully. When I live fully, I believe I make God, the Source of Life, visible.
I believe I experience God as the “Source of Love,” which also flows through the universe, but which, once again, comes to self-consciousness only in human beings. If God is the Source of Love then the only way I can worship God is by loving, loving wastefully. When I love beyond all barriers I believe I make God, the Source of Love visible.
I believe I experience God as the “Ground of all Being,” to borrow a phrase made popular by the German theologian Paul Tillich, who was my primary early theological mentor. This means that the more that I have the courage to be all that I am capable of being the more I make the God, who is the “Ground of Being,” visible.
Finally, I am a Christian, not because I believe the mythological understandings of the past in some literal way, but because I see in Jesus the very dimensions of my experience of God. I see in him a life so fully lived that he reveals to me the “Source of Life;” a love so wastefully shared that he reveals to me the “Source of Love,” and one who has the courage to be all that he was meant to be, revealing to me the God who is the “Ground of Being.” Yes, I can and do join with Paul and proclaim without equivocation and with integrity that “God was in Christ.”
The task of the Christian faith to me is not to make people religious or to save the sinful, but rather to introduce us all to a new dimension of what it means to be human. It is at this point for me that God becomes not a noun to be defined, but a verb to be lived. The book, Jesus for the Non-Religious, is thus for me the clarion call to see and to embrace a new Christianity for a new world.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Beth Trewstar from Bernardsville, New Jersey, writes:

Question:
It was fun to read the questions from the man from Saudi Arabia. Here is a question it raises for me. Why do you think there are four gospels which overlap and conflict? If people (men) at the 4th century Council of Nicea were writing the creeds and doctrines based on documents from the 1st century, why didn’t they clean up the whole mess? Why leave so many questions unanswered?

Answer:
Dear Beth,

To answer your question would involve much more background knowledge about how the gospels came into being and how the authorities of the church decided to treat them prior to the 4th century than this format of a question and answer can possibly cover. I treated this subject in much more detail in my book, Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, which took over 300 pages! Let me, however, seek to address your concern even if I must do it with brevity.

The gospel-writing tradition did not enter Christianity until the 8th decade of the Christian era. It went on for about a hundred years and many more gospels than those that appear in the Bible were completed. The first three that appear in the New Testament, Mark, Matthew and Luke, are clearly related in many ways. That relationship is explained almost universally by New Testament scholars today on the basis of what is called the “Primacy of Mark.” Mark is clearly the earliest of the three gospels. It is also the shortest. The reason for this emerges out of an internal study of Mark. This author appears to open his gospel with the baptism of Jesus at the hands of one called John the Baptist. That story clearly reflects the synagogue liturgy created around the theme of the Jewish New Year, which is called Rosh Hashanah. At Rosh Hashanah, the trumpet or the ram’s horn was sounded, the people gathered and the proclamation was heard that the Kingdom of God was at hand. The admonition was then given for the people to prepare for that Kingdom’s arrival with acts of penitence. When at Rosh Hashanah’s end, the Kingdom of God had still not arrived, the celebration closed with the words: “Next year in Jerusalem.” This Rosh Hashanah liturgy was designed to keep alive the anticipation that the promised Kingdom would someday arrive.

In Mark’s opening narrative, what he has done is to turn John the Baptist into the human trumpet that serves to gather the people together. He then has John the Baptist speak the Rosh Hashanah words and then he suggests that Jesus is the Messiah, who ultimately will inaugurate the Kingdom. Thus Mark opens his gospel with a Rosh Hashanah story. When we get to the end of Mark, we discover that he has set the story of the crucifixion against the background of the synagogue’s observance of the Passover. The Last Supper becomes in Mark the Passover meal. Jesus is portrayed as the new paschal lamb whose blood has been placed on the cross, which is seen as the “doorpost” of the world. In the original Passover story the blood of the Lamb of God was placed on the doorposts of every Jewish home so that God’s angel of death would “pass over” (and hence the name) that home. The blood of the lamb was believed to have had the power to repel death. The blood of Jesus, the new paschal lamb, on the doorposts to the world was also thought to have had the power to repel death at least for those who came to God through him. The Jewish symbol was still operative.

When these two Jewish liturgical events are put together, it becomes apparent that Mark’s gospel was written to be a series of Jesus stories designed to lead the worship life of the followers of Jesus from the Jewish New year in the fall to the Passover in the early spring, or from late September or early October to late March or early April. That means that Mark has given his readers Jesus stories for about six and a half months of the 12-month year. Once the pattern of having Jesus stories available at synagogue worship even for six and a half months was established, the pressure began to grow to provide Jesus stories to cover the other five and a half months of the calendar year.

Matthew, writing in the mid-eighties was the first to undertake this task. Using Mark as his guide and, in the process, incorporating about 90% of Mark directly into his gospel, Matthew began his story after Passover and he filled it with mostly new material until he reached Rosh Hashanah where he could pick up Mark’s story line and, though expanding it, he basically followed that story line until he reached his conclusion. From an analysis of Matthew’s unique material, that is the material that was not taken over from Mark, we can determine that he wrote his gospel for use in a fairly traditional worshiping community made up of those Jews who had become followers of Jesus. His gospel, with its year round cycle of Jesus stories, became the most popular one in Jewish-Christian circles.

Luke, writing maybe a decade after Matthew had completed his gospel (some would argue for an even later date), also expanded Mark. Not only was the community for which Luke wrote far less traditionally Jewish than Matthew’s, but it was also probably far removed from Jerusalem and included a growing number of Gentile proselytes. So his gospel reflected a more universal tone. While he used Mark, it was to a lesser degree than Matthew; perhaps only about 50% of Mark was incorporated into Luke. There is debate on whether or not Luke also had Matthew before him when he wrote or whether both Matthew and Luke had another independent, but now lost document that we call Q. I think he did have Matthew, but that is a debate that it would take hundreds of pages to defend and this is neither the time nor the place to do so. Luke’s gospel became very popular in the more cosmopolitan parts of the empire where the various Christian churches were evolving into being less Jewish and more Gentile communities.

John, the fourth gospel to be completed, was finished near the end of the first century, 95-100, and appears not to be dependent on any of the others, but John still may well have been aware of them. I believe he was, though there is still debate about that among New Testament scholars.

When the church leaders first began the process of defining the Canon of Scripture around the year 150 CE, these four gospels, which clearly were the consensus favorites, became the core of the developing New Testament. Each of the four had a strong following. Each met different needs. Each came to be regarded as so sacred that merging the gospels into one consistent narrative was never considered. That was not much of a problem until later when the scriptures were elevated into being thought of quite literally as “The Word of God.” That was when contradictions among the various gospel texts, of which there are many, began to embarrass the literalistic claims being made for the Bible by those who came to be called fundamentalists. These fundamentalists then began to develop very convoluted and elaborate defenses of literalism with which they tried to explain away the inconsistencies of the texts. The status achieved by these four gospels had by that time become so high that any scribe who might dare to alter them to rid them of the inconsistencies began to be frowned on significantly. No one could change the “Word of God!”

The other gospels, the ones we now call the Apocryphal Gospels, never achieved the status of the four though they might well have become the favorites of one community or another. By the fourth century, the four gospels now in the New Testament had universally come to be regarded as authoritative.

The problem people have today and which your question reflects, is that almost all of us have been raised inside some literalistic view of the Bible. The claim that people can hear God speak through the scriptures has been distorted to suggest that the literal words of scripture are themselves the “words of God.” The fact that the words of the Bible might point to the God that people worship has been lost in the assumption that the Bible itself is worthy of worship. To this day, ecclesiastical practices continue to reflect that distortion. That is why the gospel book is elevated and processed into the congregation to be read and perhaps even worshipped. That is why the one reading it goes through all sorts of elaborate magical signs crossing themselves and the Gospel-book before proceeding to read the gospel. That is why lessons from scripture are concluded with the assertion: “This is the Word of the Lord.” That is why most Bibles are printed in two columns on each page instead of like other books. Two columns per page is a style reserved for encyclopedias, dictionaries and telephone directories. They are not for reading, they are places to go to find authoritative answers.

When we break the idolatry with which we have surrounded the Bible in general and the gospels in particular, questions like yours will no longer arise.

Thanks for your letter.

John Shelby Spong

Announcements
Have you heard about A Joyful Path, Progressive Christian Spiritual Curriculum, for ages 6-10?

Bishop Spong says: “The great need in the Christian church is for a Sunday school curriculum for children that does not equate faith with having a pre-modern mind.  The Center for Progressive Christianity has produced just that.  Teachers can now teach children in Sunday school without crossing their fingers.  I endorse it wholeheartedly.”

Find out more about our in-home and Sunday School curriculum that is compassionate, intelligent and inclusive here!

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