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Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy
The Book has Arrived!
It has happened in my life twenty-five times before. It seems that one might get used to it after a while. That is not, however, how the emotional patterns work in the life of an author. The moment of the book’s birth is always accompanied by anxiety; sometimes even reaching the depths of mild depression. Although it almost always comes before the promised date, the waiting for its arrival still seems like an eternity. Then the day comes; the doorbell rings and a package is in the hands of the UPS man. It is the proper size. Its return address is the name of your publisher. You know immediately that although still unwrapped, what is now actually in your hands is the first copy, hot off the press, of your much anticipated newest book. You embrace it, walk inside your door and call to your wife. This is not a package one can open alone. It must be a shared experience. Your wife comes. You tell her what it is. Together you lift the volume out of its packing material. The book upon which you have worked for almost five years is now finished. It rests gently in your loving hands.
Both of you stare at its cover. Your name adorns that cover. You feel intimations of immortality. “Immortality” in the world of books is, however, a very time-limited period. Very few books remain in publication for as long as ten years. At this moment, however, euphoria trumps reality. The title stares at you from the cover. Titles are quite frequently a source of conflict between the author and the publisher, at least they have been frequently for me. Authors tend to want a title that conveys the substance of the book to its potential readers. Publishers are more driven to find a title provocative enough to grab the attention of the book store browsers, the voices of the media as well as the potential reader. They favor a title that will literally leap off the shelf and grab the shopper. In this book my publisher liked the title from the very beginning. Perhaps I have learned over the years to think more like them. From the beginning this manuscript was called Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy. It was a challenging, and an in-your-face kind of title. Our debate was only over the sub-title. My publisher, Harper Collins, did not want to dilute the power of the title with any subtitle at all. I wanted a subtitle that would describe fairly accurately what was in this books pages. So I proposed these words: A Journey into A New Christianity through the Doorway of Matthew’s Gospel. To me this was an honest telling to the readers of what to expect in these pages. To my publishers, however, these words cut the power of the title and weakened its impact. The compromise was that the subtitle will not be seen except inside the book itself. No reader will ever know the subtitle unless he or she reads the book. In the end I was OK with that.
The most emotional part of a new book for the author is the dedication page. Most readers skip over this page with little notice. To the author, however, it is very important. This book is dedicated to three different groups. First, in a category all by herself, is my wife Christine. She is not just my life partner now for more than twenty-six years, but she is also the person who makes life itself so very special and wonderful for me. In addition to being the one to whom I am emotionally committed, one with whom I am deeply in love, but she is also my editor. To be in love with the person who changes your sentences, corrects your punctuation and sometimes even reorganizes your thought processes, is rather unusual. We have, however, managed to forge a writing partnership over the years that has made me a far more productive author than I could possibly have been without her. She is also the manager of my career. She organizes my schedule, accepts speaking invitations for me, handles the necessary travel and hotel arrangements and, in the process, always seems to endear herself to those who become our hosts. In my “retirement,” I have in some years done as many as two hundred and fifty public lectures a year while in other years the total has been as few as one hundred public lectures. Either number makes for a rather busy life. The difference is usually determined by the years in which books have been published. This year, for example, will be a very busy year. To lift Christine up in this way and to acknowledge publicly what she means to me is a source of great joy, though most readers will, “little note nor long remember” this dedicatory page in the book.
The second group in the dedication page consists of our five children. One of the great privileges of maturity is to have deep friendships with one’s own children. I have reached that state of blessedness. So with great pleasure I list each name. Only a parent knows all the ups and downs of the parent-child relationship but nothing gives me greater pleasure today than to bask in our children’s accomplishments that are universally obvious.
The third group on the dedication page is a category I have called “My Three Greatest Mentors.” This is the list of the three intellectual friends, my teachers and mentors who have most significantly formed my thinking and thus shaped my life. The three are very easy for me to identify. They are in a class by themselves. No one else is close. The first is a man named John Elbridge Hines. He was the Presiding Bishop of my church from 1963-1974. These were the years in our nation’s life of school desegregation in the South, the years of urban riots that were racially tinged in the cities of the North, and the years of the Vietnam War and its protest movement. John Hines led my church nationally through this period of history with a determination that was single minded. He was a man of genuine strength and unimpeachable integrity. Once this man saw a compelling vision he walked toward it without considering a compromise that might have served to make his witness more palatable and popular. He taught me how to be a leader, how to stand for truth, how to endure my critics with love and how to change the world. No man shaped my life more dramatically than did John Hines.
The second was also a bishop, but this time in the Church of England. He too was an author and an ecclesiastical critic. His name was John A. T. Robinson. He taught me that I could combine the life of a scholastic with the life of a bishop. Few people in our history as a church have been able to accomplish this. He, like me, was a controversial bishop who did not live inside the lines within which the church seems to expect all its bishops to remain. John Robinson did not choose to hide in the murky waters of theological antiquity. He, like me, felt a call to challenge the formulas by which the Christian Church lived and, in the process, to engage the thought forms of modernity. I am more than honored today that at the Gladstone Library in Wales, there is today an established and endowed annual lectureship on “Contemporary Theology” called the John A. T. Robinson-John Shelby Spong lectureship. I am delighted to be linked with my great mentor in this way.
The third of my three mentors was a New Testament scholar who taught at the University of Birmingham in the UK. His name is Michael D. Goulder. I discovered Michael’s work in the 1990’s when I was studying at Oxford University. His operating thesis was that the gospels are Jewish books deeply related to the Jewish Scriptures and to the liturgical patterns of synagogue worship. I devoured Michael’s body of work and even stretched it in some new directions. Michael’s scholarship made biblical literalism an impossibility for me any longer even to tolerate, so distorting was it of Christian truth. This newest book will reflect Michael’s influence on me more than any other, but for those who have followed my writing career closely, this book will only be the climax of my connection with this man’s thought in which I have lived for almost thirty years now.
All three of my mentors have died, but their thought and their influence continue to live today in me in deep and rich ways. I hope that my thought and influence will someday live in those that I might have had the opportunity to influence both in the past and in the years ahead. Perhaps someday some young and exciting students will take my work and turn it into new conclusions and, in the process, acknowledge me as their mentor. I hope I have brought honor to John Hines, John Robinson and Michael Goulder. They each have meant the world to me.
So now my newest book has been born. It begins today a life of its own. I can no longer control it. People will see in it things I never imagined. They will take from it ideas I never engaged. Its theme, however, is clear. Jesus was a Jew whose life called his contemporary world to view God in a new way. That new way still commends itself to me. Because of Jesus, I no longer see God as a being, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to my world and ready to intervene to come to my aid or to my rescue. Rather I see God as the Source of life giving me the enhanced capacity to live, to live fully. I see God as the Source of love freeing me to love beyond any barrier, to love wastefully. I see God as the Ground of Being giving me the courage to be all that I am capable of being. It is by living fully that I make the God who is life visible. It is by loving wastefully that I make the God who is love visible. It is by being all that I am capable of being that I make the God who is the Ground of Being visible.
That is who and what God is to me. I reach God by traveling a Jewish pathway into the gospels. Most particularly in this book I do it by walking deeply into Matthew’s gospel, where I discover that biblical literalism is not the way into God, but an expression of Gentile heresy and Gentile ignorance.
The book is now in the public arena. Do with it what you will.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Joonas Vapaavuori from Helsinki, Finland, writes:
Question:
I admire your work and I am currently working on my master’s thesis on your views of Christianity and its future. I am at the moment dealing with your writings on atonement and Yom Kippur and finding them very intriguing and important for a better understanding of religion. You talk a great deal about consciousness and a probable “universal consciousness,” which might be the next step for human beings seeking God.
Lately I’ve been reading writings by the late Jesuit named Anthony De Mello and some publications of a non-religious spiritual teacher named Eckhart Tolle. If I am not totally mistaken, you find some mystical views of Christianity fruitful and I think these two fellows are bringing some mystical aspects, awareness and deeper consciousness to the modern era. So I would like to ask you if you’re familiar with their work and if you can relate to their thoughts in any way.
Answer:
Dear Joonas,
I am delighted to hear from you and to know about your work at the University of Helsinki. I had the privilege of doing some lectures at that university some years ago and recall it today with great pleasure and satisfaction.
My studies in the realm of developing consciousness would only be at what I would call the preliminary levels. I did write about mysticism in my book on the gospel of John entitled, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. The concept of mysticism helps me to transcend the limits of creedal theology, which has, I believe, distorted the Christian faith since the fourth century. I will be addressing these distortions in detail in my current series, entitled “Charting a New Reformation.”
I am not as familiar with the writings of Anthony De Mello as I am with Eckhart Tolle. I was introduced several years ago to De Mello’s thought by a friend in Spain whose name is Domingo Melera. Domingo was quite enthusiastic about his work. I need to read more.
Tolle, on the other hand, is a well-read author in some religious circles in America. He is what I would call a popularizer more than an original thinker. I do not denigrate that designation, indeed I consider myself to be in that same category. Tolle has, in fact, adopted the name of one of the great theologians of mysticism in Christian history, Meister Eckhart. Eckhart succeeded Thomas Aquinas in the same chair of theology in the 14th century. The thought of the two men, Aquinas and Eckhart, was so different as to create widespread dislocation in European theological thinking. Eckhart transcended all limits and threatened those who presumed they had captured eternal truth in a human form. Ultimately, Eckhart was put on trial for heresy, but he died before the trial was over so he was never convicted. If you could get hold of some of the writings of Meister Eckhart, I think you would be drinking from the fountain that Eckhart Tolle seeks to popularize.
The two people in Finland with whom I have worked closely are Hannu Saloranta, a Lutheran pastor who recently retired. He was instrumental in translating one of my books into Finnish. The other is Willi Riekkinen, the retired Lutheran bishop of Kuopio in Finland. Willi was once my student at the Vancouver (Canada) School of Theology. He is a man of deep insight and intellectual courage. Both of these unique Finns might be willing to read your master’s thesis and to assist in its final preparation.
I hope you will stay in touch.
John Shelby Spong
Announcements
"With last week's column the exposition of the first of the twelve theses is complete. The discussion of the next thesis will begin with the column on February 11. It will be on Thesis number 2. This series still has a long way to go." ~JSS
