HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
Charting a New Reformation
Part X – Thesis # 2: Jesus the Christ
“If God can no longer be thought of in theistic terms, then conceiving of Jesus as ‘the incarnation of the theistic deity’ has also become a bankrupt concept.”
Some years ago in conversation with the Dean of a theological seminary, he made what he surely thought was a safe assertion: “I base my faith on the Incarnation.” The Incarnation was for this dean a kind of “Maginot Line.” He had already implied in both word and action that I was no longer a “true believer.” To his dismay I responded: “I do too.” Surprised at my claim, since it violated his stereotype, he was silent. Once a Maginot Line is challenged, silence always follows. Today I turn to what has become for traditional Christians a code word: “Incarnation.”
What does “Incarnation” mean? It is clearly not a biblical concept. It reflects rather the 4th century dualistic Greek mindset in which it was born. It asserts that the external, theistic, supernatural God has taken on the flesh of a human life. In that process, Christian theologians asserted for centuries, against all the evidence to the contrary, that neither the divinity of God nor the humanity of Jesus’ biological life had been compromised in this affirmation. These ideas made no rational sense, but they were repeated again and again. The clear implication has been that they do not have to make sense. One does not question a theological mantra, one only repeats it. So 4th century Christians placed these words into the Christian Creed: “For us and our salvation, he came down from heaven and was incarnate by the holy spirit of the substance of the Virgin Mary and was made human.”
The clear implication of this creedal assertion was that in Jesus God had taken on the form of human life. Jesus was thus a divine being in a human disguise. After all, “incarnation” literally means “enfleshment.” Charles Wesley assumed this when he wrote in his Christmas carol these words: “Veiled in flesh, the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity.” Because of this strange theology found in this hymn, it is my least favorite Christmas carol.
If Jesus was God in human form, all of the miracles claimed for him in the New Testament made sense. Jesus could give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, wholeness to the crippled and lame and could even raise the dead because he was “God incarnate.” Jesus could expand the food supply so that the hungry could be fed, and lead to victory the forces of goodness over the armies of our enemies, because Jesus was God in human disguise.
As this tradition developed, it also meant that if the external Holy God, who lived above the sky, was to take on human form, a landing field on which this deity could arrive on the stage of human life had to be prepared. God, however, could also not be forever bound by the limitations of human life, so there also needed to be a launching pad from which the incarnate God could be propelled back into God’s natural domain in the heavens. In time all of these mythological elements were added to the Jesus story. Like all other explanatory narratives in the faith experience, they were all too soon literalized and became part of what traditional-thinking Christians called “orthodoxy.”
When the theistic concept of God was battered by the expansion of knowledge, however, the idea of “incarnation” became more and more nonsensical. It, nonetheless, would take hundreds of years before this nonsensical aspect of our dated theological language would become apparent and begin to fall apart. That day has finally come.
The skies are filled with planets, suns and stardust and they appear to be infinite. There is no supernatural being beyond the clouds, watching over life on planet Earth. The laws that govern the twists and turns of life are the fixed laws of nature. They are not amenable to the intervention of a supernatural deity, who can change the course of history to bring about the military victory of a favored nation or to create different outcomes in the exigencies of human life for those who pray properly. Human life is not a special creation made in the image of God. All life emerged from matter and then evolved into the complexity that marks our world today. The theistic definitions of God have been splintered on the hard rocks of reality. So has the idea that this theistic deity would somehow, in the fullness of time, incarnate the divine being into a human form. Incarnation in any literal sense is revealed to be little more than a pious hope, an unfulfilled dream. What then does it mean or indeed what can it mean to assert, as Paul does, that “God was in Christ” (II Cor. 5:19) or that God had emptied the “Being” of God into the life of a servant “being born in the form” of the human (Phil 2:5-8).
Paul was a Jew. For a Jew, God could not be defined or discussed as if God were an object that we could observe or control. God could only be experienced as a presence that transformed human life and drew it beyond its boundaries. So we need to ask what was Paul’s experience, which caused him to use language that could ultimately be interpreted as “incarnation” by those who needed to define the experience? Can that experience be recovered? Can it be something into which we could walk? Literalized inside human language, this concept makes no sense today to modern ears. Must we Christians then still confront the world with this claim as if we are people endowed with the inarticulate sounds of unknown tongues? Can we deny every aspect of our literal creedal affirmations about Jesus and still call ourselves Christians? Can we still be Jesus’ disciples? I believe we can, but not until we extricate ourselves from the creedal language of the 4th century.
Can the divine be seen in the human? That is where we must begin. Can the human be pulled beyond its limits until it becomes the vehicle through which the divine is able to be experienced? What was there about this Jesus that lent itself to what is now thought of in the strange language of “incarnation?” What was it that caused the words “My Lord and my God” to be placed by the author of the Fourth Gospel into the mouth of the one once called “doubting Thomas?”
We come to these questions in the only way we can. We must begin with negative statements because we, as human beings, are not capable of saying what God is, so we limit ourselves to saying what God is not or what God cannot be. People did not see miraculous power in Jesus and then move from that experience to the conclusion of his divinity. The power of Jesus was experienced long before people attributed miracles to his presence. No one prior to the writing of Mark in the 8th decade ever associated miracles with Jesus. Paul, who wrote between 51-64 CE, never spoke of Jesus as a worker of miracles. The Q document, if its existence can be definitively established (I am quite skeptical) and if once established, can be dated as earlier or even contemporaneously with Mark, we need to note that there are no miracle narratives in it. The Jesus of supernatural acts seems to be a late-developing portrait that people painted of him. The power of Jesus had been experienced long before miracles were attributed to him. The claim that God was met in Jesus in a special and unique way also had nothing to do with narratives that asserted his miraculous birth. No miraculous or Virgin Birth story emerged in the Christian tradition until the 9th decade and it had disappeared from the tradition by the end of the 10th decade. It was neither essential nor beneficial to the claim of divinity for Jesus.
No, there was something far earlier and perhaps more profound about this Jesus that caused his followers to make the God claim for him. It was, I believe, the breaking down of all the boundaries and barriers by which we human beings separate ourselves from one another. The power of God seen in Jesus was the overcoming of all our fears and divisions. In his presence and through the experience of his life, the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Jew and Samaritan, male and female, Israel and Judah, bond and free, rich and poor, and life and death, all faded away. In Jesus there was a humanity that included all and that dismissed none. In this Jesus a human community without boundaries could be seen. God was the power of life, the passion of love, the Ground of being that draws all lives into a new humanity. That was the experience that drove people to say of this Jesus: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God.”
God is not a being who can invade and take over human life. Jesus is not God in disguise. Jesus is the fully human one in whom a separated world finds a new unity. Incarnation language today will never give us that. That kind of language needs to be abandoned, not because the experience it seeks to articulate is wrong, but because the words used to communicate its meaning no longer communicate the depth of that experience. God did not invade the world, rather the human became the vehicle through which the divine could be and was met and engaged.
Why do we seek to make it so difficult? Why do we insist that theological ideas must be literalized in order for them to be true? Do we not understand that theological idolatry can kill faith just as easily and just as quickly as biblical literalism can kill faith? The journey into Christ must carry us beyond both.
This is now the established principle through which we will begin to look at the Jesus story. Before we have completed this task we will have looked at this principle from many different angles, so stay tuned.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Robert Ross, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
Without sounding macabre, I wonder who in the next generation of authors/teachers you recommend and believe will continue to develop a similar outlook as yours on both scripture and indeed life itself.
Answer:
Dear Robert,
It is not macabre to be realistic. Life moves on and all of us move with it. I plan for at least two more years of activity pursuing my vocational goals, but that amount of time cannot obviously be guaranteed. I have speaking and writing commitments now well into 2017.
I do not worry about succession. No one invited me to succeed them and I will not appoint anyone to succeed me. Look at those religious leaders who sought to pass their careers on to their sons; it does not work. Franklin Graham is a Muslim hater and has become an embarrassment to his father Billy. Oral Robert’s son was fired from Oral Roberts University for corruption. Robert Schuller’s son led the Chrystal Cathedral into bankruptcy. Charisma and vocation do not appear to be hereditary. People rise in their own time to build on the work of their predecessors and mentors. In my recent book, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, which was published in early February of this year, I took great pleasure in dedicating it to “My three greatest mentors.” They did not choose me; I chose them, but their lives and writings made me possible. In my column of February 4th I identified them as John Elbridge Hines, John A. T. Robinson and Michael D. Goulder.
I receive mail regularly from clergy from all traditions. They share with me their hopes, their journeys and their struggles. A lot of younger voices are rising in the Christian church. They are not limited to the United States. I am in touch with progressive clergy from Poland, Hungary, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, France, Africa, Canada, Latin America, Spain, Italy, Australia and New Zealand. They live in this country in places like Phoenix, Omaha, Greely, Colorado, Hendersonville, N. C. and Richmond, Virginia, as well as in many other places. Many of these leaders are willing and even eager to engage issues and to enter arenas that I have never engaged or entered. I am thrilled by them even when I am not sure where they are headed. I think of the Reverend Gretta Vosper, now facing charges of heresy from the Neanderthal elements of an otherwise very progressive United Church of Canada.
I have been a fellow in the Jesus Seminar for about twenty years. That is an incredible theological and biblical think tank. Into that body every year come young scholars. The agenda of the Seminar moves with these younger scholars.
I am part of two different Episcopal churches. One is my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, NJ. The other is my former parish, St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, VA. Both are today headed by brilliant younger clergy. One is a generation younger and the other is two generations younger. They are courageous, competent, thinking, emerging leaders. They do not lack for followers.
The Christian Church will die of boredom long before it dies of controversy. The ranks of the ordained will continue to include a minority who will push the boundaries while the majority will seek to provide the narcotic of religious security. This remains true despite the fact that most of our denominational training schools are in the business of blessing the status quo, rather than engaging in a search for truth that will meet the people of tomorrow’s world. Out of those boundary pushers, the leaders of tomorrow will emerge. They are present in every denomination. Catholic scholarship will finally be able to flourish without the repression that marked its life under the leadership of Benedict XVI, both as Pope and as Cardinal Ratzinger. Theological seminaries like the Theological School of Drew University and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, have new deans who understand that blessing the status quo is not the doorway into tomorrow. I believe the future is bright.
Thank you for your letter and for the affirmation that what you think I have done is worthy of being replicated in the next generation.
~John Shelby Spong
Announcements
In this profound work, bestselling author and the former Episcopal Bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong offers a radical new way to look at the gospels today. Pulling back the layers of misunderstanding created over the centuries by Gentile ignorance of things Jewish, he reveals how a literal reading of the Bible is so far removed from the original intent of the Jewish authors of the gospels that it has become an act of heresy.
Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy illuminates the gospels as never before and provides a blueprint for the Church’s future—one that allows the faithful to live inside the Christian story while still embracing the modern world.
Click here for more information!
