I just finished re-reading John Spong's latest offering. I had to read it twice to make sure I was not missing anything. After all, just a few pages into the introduction, Bishop Spong declared that if he is successful in his task, then "I believe I will have set the stage for the emergence of a new burst of Christian energy and power that has not been seen for hundreds of years.” (xiii)
Wherever this new burst of energy and power has been hidden, I have not found it here. What would allow the dam to burst and this new force of Christianity sweep the world? He argues that we will do this by seeing the Jewishness of Jesus and ridding ourselves of theistic concepts and language which are merely evolutionary leftovers. We are, it seems to Bishop Spong, a species of beatnik poets, struggling against existential "anxiety" like footnotes in a Freudian textbook. The only supposed cure for this anxiety is the illusion of a God conceived and portrayed as something other than ourselves. By freeing Christianity from outdated concepts and language, we can see the Christ-experience and embrace the real Jesus. In order to do this, it is necessary to demythologize the narratives which have grown up around the person of Jesus. Gone are any notions of a virgin birth, Mary and Joseph, most of the disciples (even Judas is historical fiction - which now saves me the trouble of addressing the Gospel of Judas) any form of the miraculous, any notion of a supernatural intervention in a purely materialistic existence. Anything else is fundamentalism - a general term for any other possible understanding, although it would appear that only the straw man makes an appearance: a "God" who does miracles is capricious (54), ascension is not possible because "one does not exit this world by rising into the sky without jet propulsion" (67);
This is the foundation: Bishop Spong claims to be aware of something called "our postmodern scientific world". That statement in itself tells us something of Spong's limited attention to the shift from modernity and its religion within the limits of reason alone (to borrow from Kant), to a post-critical reading of sacred texts, and a postmodern critique of the limits of the scientific worldview and method. Spong's entire approach has not moved beyond the limits of empiricism, and so he fails to grasp how there can be a Being beyond Tillich's ground of being.
It is the presuppositions which hinder what still can be a number of helpful commonplace observations. Spong goes to great length to point out that events in the Gospels have antecedents in the Hebrew Scriptures. Nothing new here for someone familiar with basic biblical studies. Making such connections can be helpful for people who have never grasped any continuity in the biblical narrative.
But then Spong argues that such having antecedents are themselves evidence against the historicity of almost all the Gospel events (88ff et al). "...[T]his would also mean that this intervening God would have to micromanage the world in order to guard those scriptures" (113). Given that there can be no "God" cooperating with humanity in order to produce a sacred text in the first place, the rest of the conclusions are easily drawn. We need to rid ourselves of this "superstitious way of reading the scriptures".
Still 2/3 of the way into the book, and I still have not met this Jesus for the non-religious. When he is finally introduced, he is going to cause a revolution by calling us to embrace tolerance, diversity, reject prejudice and stereotypes, and in the end, we will all become contemporary Episcopalians. Or something like that.
So what is good in this book? The connections between the Gospels and the Hebrew scriptures should generally be helpful to novices. The dismissal of the caricature of Christianity is something that most could agree with. The only problem is that it is a dismissal of a caricature.
Where does the book fall short, apart from the thoroughly modernist assumptions about humanity and reality? First, Spong offers no compelling reasons, within his framework, as to why in the world all of this mythology should have been built up around the person of Jesus in particular. As someone who has some familiarity with the classical world, I can tell you why a mythology of divinity arose around the Caesars. But there is no convincing reason in Spong's book explaining why it should have arisen around Jesus. Unless, of course...
When Jesus for the non religious is finally introduced, he does not appear to me to be a compelling figure in any way. If I were to give an introduction of Jesus to a non religious friend, I would much rather go with works by someone like Brian McLaren. Even though I don't agree with everything McLaren writes, at least his presentation of Jesus is a truly human Jesus, a Jesus who radically challenges and a Jesus who, as a character, comes alive. Spong's Jesus will be left in modernity, where he was created.
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It is fascinating that Spong (a non-scientist) holds aloft science as the true absolute. I would be interested to hear a science-based reply to Spong...it would be a bit less absolute in it's belief that science carries all the answers. At best, science is only good at asking questions.
And, speaking as an engineer of the aerospace ilk, there are more ways than jet propulsion to rise up in the air. Myself, I believe the ascension happened with Jesus rising up in a hot air ballon...in my own prayer/visualization time (which I do clutching a copy of Einstein's memoirs) I can clearly see that this ballon is banana-shaped.
Thanks for your erudite analysis of Spong.
Posted by: Matt | January 09, 2008 at 07:18 AM
It is good that Spong wants to emphasise the "Jewishness of Jesus", but he doesn't even get that right. For a cogent and illuminating perspective of Jesus as a first-century Palestinian Jew, one could read any number of Tom Wright's books, e.g., The Original Jesus or Jesus and the Victory of God.
Posted by: Scott Gilbreath | January 09, 2008 at 08:46 AM
What I find most disappointing about this book is that it has several of the right pieces. Spong is right to suggest that devotional life and biblical scholarship need to be more in touch. But then his presuppositions cause the subjugation of devotional life to a single form of biblical scholarship. A much more helpful relationship, I think, can be seen in Pelikan's history of Christian doctrine series. Pelikan points to the relationship between what the church teaches and confesses, and its doctrine.
And of course, the basic question is one of the possibility of sacred text as revelation.
Posted by: joseph | January 09, 2008 at 10:22 AM
Spong always liked to present himself as one whe was presenting a new thing. He never has, and in this book, he still hasn't. Turns out, he's just another in a line of non-scientists, who wouldn't recognize real science if it were being done on them, who want to put humans and humanity on a pedestal, and see the science they do not understand as a way to do so.
As a scientist, I don't much appreciate his efforts. It makes doing science that much harder.
Posted by: Gerry Hunter | January 14, 2008 at 03:06 PM