RT,
You didn’t really ask, but John Crossan is a Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at DePaul University
Damn it, I didn’t mean to hit that submit button.
As I was saying, Crossan is a professor at DePaul University, and he was also one of the leading figurees of the Jesus Seminar. He’s written several books on the historiciry of jkesus and is one of the foremost authorities in the world on historical Jesus research.
I can give you a more detailed explanation of his argument that Jesus may not have been taken off the cross, if your interested (if not, forget it). The historicity of the crucifixion itself is a bout as certain as anything can be with Jesus. It is basically the only detail, in fact, which is attested to by non-Biblical historical sources.
It may seem off topic, but I think that part of what Spong is doing is trying to get Christians to take a more rationalist, empirical view of things, and a re=evaluation of the historical facts is not unreasonable IMO.
Damn it, I didn’t mean to hit that submit button.
As I was saying, Crossan is a professor at DePaul University, and he was also one of the leading figurees of the Jesus Seminar. He’s written several books on the historiciry of jkesus and is one of the foremost authorities in the world on historical Jesus research.
I can give you a more detailed explanation of his argument that Jesus may not have been taken off the cross, if you’re interested (if not, forget it). The historicity of the crucifixion itself is a bout as certain as anything can be with Jesus. It is basically the only detail, in fact, which is attested to by non-Biblical historical sources.
It may seem off topic, but I think that part of what Spong is doing is trying to get Christians to take a more rationalist, empirical view of things, and a re=evaluation of the historical facts is not unreasonable IMO.
Wow, an inadvertent “submit” followed by a double post-- it’s not my night.
Oh, and Crossan is also a former Catholic priest.
Also, the bit about Jesus before the high priest is almost certainly fiction. In fact the entire passion story was probably fabricated years after the fact.
Well, this is the problem. If one believes that Christianity is built on a foundation of lies, then the thing to do is just ditch it altogether.
If someone wants to start another religion based on what the Jesus Seminar believes is authentic, and call it something else, like “The True Jesus Faith” or whatever strikes their fancy, I think they should go ahead and do so. It’s a free country.
But “Christianity” is the faith that believes that Jesus is part of the Godhead, and has placed the Crucifixion and Resurrection at the center of its meaning. There’s no law against saying these things didn’t happen the way the Gospels say they did. But within Christianity, that’s a settled issue - except in certain abstruse circles that seem to have gone their own way, disconnected from the larger family of believers.
The problem with Spong is that he lacks the guts to truly go out on his own and start a new faith dedicated to Jesus as Spong understands Jesus to be. Much as he talks bravely of ‘exile’, he’s not going anywhere, and certainly not abandoning his title of ‘Bishop’.
It wasn’t based on "“lies,” exactly, at last not in the sense of deliberate deception. The gospelers were wriing about a event that they had lttle or no direct information about. The original disciples had scattered in the wake of Jesus’ arrest there were probably no eyewitnesses to the crucifixion itself. There are no first accounts in the gospels or anywhere else. In order to describe and understand what happened the evangelists turned to the Hebrew Bible looking for prophecies and clues about the Messiah. The passion narratives were then constructed from these “prophesies,” not as intentional fiction, but out of the belief that the Hebrew Scriptures were right and that what they perceived as prophecies must have been accurate clues about what happened to Jesus. They didn’t think they were “lying” they thought they were digging up facts from the OT.
It is possible to do a verse by verse breakdown of the passions and show through textual and historical analysis how they were constructed from OT verses (Crossan has written an entire book which does just that) but it is rather dry and pedantic to go over and would take too long in a message board thread. I don’t think it’s necessary to disbelieve the passions, however, even if we take the nature of their composition into account. If you believe that the OT prophesies were, indeed, accurate predictions about Jesus, and if you further believe that the evangelists were guided and inspired by God as they investigated, interpreted and wrote, then there’s no problem with reading the passions as true.
I think you have a valid point, here, and it’s the hardest point for Spong to answer. One of his core assertions, though, is that Christianity cannot survive increasing empirical scrutiny. Some aspects of Biblical belief have already been forever altered by scientific discovery. We now know that the earth is not the center of the universe. We now know that the Genesis account of creation is completly unsupportable as literal fact. It has become harder and harder to defend beliefs in miracles, virgin births and resurrections. It is especially difficult to take a position that Christian miracle stories are true, but that the miracles of every other religion are only myths. Spong thinks that Christianity has to redefine itself in more rationalist terms or go the way of Zeus and Mithra in terms of credibility.
Obviously, you can totally disagree with Spong on that point, but I think that his intention is not to degrade or disavow Christianity but to preserve it. He’s trying to save the faith that he loves by modeling it in such a way that it cannot be swallowed up by science. Of course, a lot of people think that Spong is totally out to lunch on his fear that Christianity will die in it’s present state, but I think that his intentions are noble and are based on sincere faith. I also think that he is suggesting a paradigm for ethical behavior and spiritual/emotional fulfillment which has the potential to attract people who have difficulty with buying into the supernatural aspects of religion. I know that for a lot of people, the supernatural aspects are the point, though, and it may be debateable as to whether Spong’s new vision can be called “Christianity,” but I think that also puts us in the “no true Scotsman” category. Spong could just as easily say that fundamentalist are not “true Christians,” and what makes his assertion any less valid than anyone else’s. How can one group define Christianity for everyone else? It’s not like the word has an objective definition in the first place.
This discussion is getting very interesting, and cuts to the quick of what we believe and why. I have a few things to throw into the mix:
First, RT, I accept the historicity of the Crucifixion and Resurrection myself. I don’t buy into Spong’s “spiritualized-realization” concept of the latter, and I think Jesus recognized that for whatever reason, He was obliged to go through the former. I’m not particularly enthusiastic about the Substitutionary Atonement doctrine; it sounds like God made an arbitrary rule about using a form of magic to “buy Him off” and then called Himself bound by that rule He’d made to pay off the “debt of sin” Himself. But I see that, for reasons I understand dimly if at all, Jesus recognized that He had to die in order to “draw all men unto Himself.”
Likewise the Resurrection. My insistence on “It is raised a spiritual body” is founded on a distaste for the resuscitation-of-the-physical-body bit as the totality of what happened on the First Easter – by itself, it sounds like the plot of a particularly cheesy B-movie, “Night of the Undead Messiah” or something! The Resurrection accounts show that what Jesus was raised as was not limited in the ways that the pre-Crucifixion human body of Jesus presumably was – if He was in Galilee and wanted to go to Jerusalem, He walked there. After the Resurrection, He appears inside locked doors in the best John Dickson Carr fashion, He isn’t recognized by two of His disciples until “He was known to them in the breaking of the bread,” He does all sorts of mystical appearance-and-prophecy stuff. He rose as more than He’d gone to the Cross as.
The empty tomb indicates that something happened to the dead body He’d inhabited before the Crucifixion – evidently, it was raised and transformed in some way.
That’s why I keep insisting on “more, not less.” People who focus on the physical body are in my mind thinking along the lines of those who insist that if a well-equipped physics lab can’t measure it, it ain’t real. What He did goes beyond that. It doesn’t deny it; it transcends it.
But equally I’m not buying into the “pious reconstruction” scenario of the Jesus Seminar. I will grant, completely and totally, that the Evangelists’ focus on finding predictive prophecy for major events in Jesus’s life – Matthew in particular – does mean that one must take their views with a grain of salt. I made a comment over in the Badchad thread that Matthew would have been quite happy to describe an incident where Jesus strangled a weasel if he’d picked up on a (hypothetical) line in Proverbs that said “but the son of man shall strangle weasels.”
But sixty years after the fact, much of what happened in World War II has taken on mythical status – the leaders are seen in somewhat larger-than-life terms, as the heroic or villainous agents of good and evil. However, the interesting thing here is, they saw themselves in those roles. Churchill was with intentionality living out the role of the embodiment of the stubbornness of Britain at bay. Roosevelt saw himself in terms of the compassionate resource for those who need help, and saw America as feeling itself called by God to live out that role and himself as the leader who embodied that national resolve. I flatly refuse to get inside Stalin’s mind, but I’m confident that part of where he was coming from was the classic Russian self-image as a people of peasant steadfastness who will suffer greatly and come through to victory, and he shaped the Russian public conception of the war as the Great Patriotic War to appeal to that self-image, and himself as “home town boy makes good,” one of them in spirit who had risen to become their leader.
In that sense, I can very well see how the Apostles and Evangelists could have reported true historical events in modes that were the fulfillment of real or imagined prophecy – they saw what they’d experienced in those larger-than-life terms, by virtue of having been disciples of the living Christ, transformed into His successors and the carriers-out of His will by the Pentecost experience and the infilling of the Holy Spirit.
It’s a step beyond, but very much akin to, the sense that most Christians (I think) get of occasionally seeing how what they’re doing is one small element in the divine Plan. I know I’ve felt it on occasion, and once in a while I hear a revealing comment that indicates someone else does too.
However, and this is key to me, it’s possible for us to wear our “spiritual blinders” and by insisting on the necessity of a particular mental structuring of how something is explained, deny the greater truth of what that something truly means.
I went through this at some length over in the Pizza Parlor Kitchen on good old John 14:6 – “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man comes to the Father except by Me.” True or false?
Well, yes, it’s true. But there are a bunch of points made here that people fail to take into account. First, the context in which it’s said is to Thomas, who seems to be conceiving of “the Way” as some mystical doctrine which Jesus is teaching His disciples, and which Thomas doesn’t understand yet – and Jesus has said He’s going away where the disciples cannot yet follow, which would leave Thomas bereft of “the Way,” whatever in heck it may be. Jesus says it to reassure Thomas – “‘The Way’ is not some mystical doctrine, Thomas – I am the Way. If you know Me, you know the Way – and you do know Me. Follow Me; I am the way – I’ll lead you to the Father.”
Second, Jesus is the Way. Not “accepting Jesus into your heart as your personal Lord and Savior and proclaiming Him with your mouth.” Not “having a true faith and believing thus about the Trinity.” Not “experiencing the second birth and being infilled with the Holy Spirit.” Not “being duly baptized by a priest or bishop in the Apostolic Succession.”
Jesus is the Way. Not our handy-dandy denominational ways of accessing Him. He Himself, the one who is truly God and truly Man.
And He doesn’t limit Himself to what we think of as the “right way” to get to Him. To quote two things I said over there:
It’s in this context that Spong is doing something very valuable – he’s challenging all the handy little assumptions we’re making. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is that in one ousia there exist three hypostases? Well, no. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is that in the man Jesus Christ, we see God and in the Holy Spirit whom He sent, God indwells us to comfort, strengthen, and guide us. How can this be? Well, if you look at Aristotle…
The point is, Aristotle and the ousia and hypostases are human attempts to wrap that bit of empirical theology underscored above with conceptual language that human beings can work with. And if they don’t work for you, throw 'em out. If someone can accept that the underscored statement is true for them, then they’re a Trinitarian Christian; the Aristotelian language is just a framework on which to hang a vague and imperfect understanding of that overwhelming fact.
I don’t much give a rodential rectum what happened at the Ascension – the accounts presuppose a “rising up into Heaven” visualized in a naive three-tier-universe way. If someone has a problem with that conceptualization, no sweat! The key point is that the Resurrection appearances ended with some sort of transcendent event that is best visualized as ‘Jesus ascended into Heaven’ in that naive conceptualization. I’m perfectly well aware of the planetary dynamics of the Solar System, but that doesn’t stop me from talking about sunrise and sunset. It’s the convenient, everyday language based on a naive “sun moves around the earth, rises in the east and sets in the west” imagery. Well, it doesn’t – but that’s what I see happening. And Jesus ascended in a way that defies human language conceptualization, so the best way to speak about it is the same simple language. It’s like I said in the “What does calling God ‘Him’ imply” thread – when we resort to abstract conceptualization, what we really need to say about God being personal becomes impossible to express, so we utilize language that is not strictly accurate but carries the flavor of the Truth, the personal significance of it, in ways that the abstract language fails to convey.
I’d like to chime in and thank you RTF for presenting your opposition to Spong and his beliefs in such a reasoned, considerate manner. It makes for good discourse.
Cheers,
Mars
I’ll second that, RT.
Third.
I think I can sum up Spong’s philosophy by quoting Karl Marx: “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” It also a good idea to point out that Karl Marx asked Charles Darwin for permission to dedicate the English-language edition of Das Kapital to him.
As far as I am concerned, Spong is another clone of H. L. Mencken.
The only character coming closer is that played by Leonard Ceeley in the Marx Brothers’ movie A Day at the Races (1937); the business manager Mr. Whitmore. Watch the movie, which is available on VHS, and you will see what I mean.
dougie_monty,
I’m sorry but I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m especially mystified by this sentence:
Why is this important to you, and what does it have to do with Spong?
If this mystifies you, do a search through this thread (with Ctrl & F, if you like), for Darwin, and that should answer your question. And while you’re at it, tell me all about Piltdown Man. :mad:
Simply stated, evolution and the Bible are not compatible; but I’m not standing in line to do a Fahrenheit 451 on the Bible.
C’mon, Dougie! I’ll listen and patiently walk through the standard five-paragraph explanation on that in response to that sort of remark from a college freshman newbie; it’s the first time that anybody’s taken their reservations about the doctrine the’ve been force-fed seriously, and they deserve respect. But you’ve been here three years now; you’ve participated in these threads.
Darwinian theory and a literal reading of all of the Bible are incommensurable, granted (though I’ve seen a couple of mental contortionists try to make them work together). But the idea that the Bible was the product of men through whose thick heads God was trying to get a set of ideas across to people, and who usually didn’t listen very well, is in no way contradictory to Darwinian thought.
Gimme a break – you’ve heard me say this at least ten times, and others have had the same thing to say. You want to propose your statement as an OP? – Fine. You’ll get precisely what I just said as the first salvo, and like as not from an agnostic or atheist who has some respect for the concept that I and other accept in it, and sees the gaping logical flaw in what you said.
To take one of the classic examples, Gandhi never “walked away from Christ” – he was an avid reader of His Word all his life, but read it in a Hindu perspective. Why? Because racist South Africans refused to let an Indian in their churches, and he worked from the culture he’d been taught as a child. Did Jesus love Gandhi? Did He speak inside his heart? That’s between him and Gandhi. But for remarkably good reasons Gandhi never “became a Christian” in the sense that you or I have – overtly confessing Christ and joining a church. Is Gandhi saved? The only honest answer I can give is “I don’t know – it depends on whether Jesus got through to him.”
—Gandhi does offer an excellent case study. At the humane level he saw similar merits in all religions. He frequently called himself a Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew etc. One can also distinguish him from naturalists or atheists or even people who believe there is some “force” behind Life because he believed in the notion of a transcendental merciful loving God. However, his notion of God was very much Hinduism-oriented. Interestingly enough, when one includes the third level where most differences between religions arise, i.e., culture of the people, he found Christianity lacking. He never understood why the people of a religion founded on mercy and compassion would eat meat. He had frequent “arguments” with Christians on the proselytizing nature of Christianity and the colonian baggage it came with. IOW, on thoroughly reading the major religions, Gandhi is said to have arrived at the conclusion that the Hindu ideals inspired his personal beliefs the most. Of course, one could always argue that the Hindu culture was what he knew growing up and hence is a natural fit. But specifically, he has written about being influenced by the tale of the ever-truthful King Harischandra (a Hindu story, if you may call it so), the practice of avoiding meat, the practice of medicine amongst other things. Technically one can say that Gandhi never accepted Jesus in the sense Christians are supposed to. It could be convincingly argued by Christian theologians that Gandhi was not saved.
Sorry for the minor hijack but there might be similarities between Spong and Gandhi. As RTFirefly has eloquently written, you cannot reject the vital tenets of the religion that enable its self-identification and still call yourself a practising Christian.
Litost, I take your point, and definitely see Gandhi as approaching God from a Hindu perspective. But, and here’s my point, he continued to read the Bible, to attempt to grasp things from a Christian understanding – perhaps the main reason he never became a Christian is how he was treated by self-identified Christians in his youth in South Africa. And if we take seriously Paul’s comments about what constitutes being a Christian and Jesus’s own identification of Himself, not things we might do, as the Way, then Gandhi knew Him. I’m not out to make a definite proof that Gandhi’s “saved” in Christian jargonese – just that by our own standards, it’s not proven that he isn’t. And he’s the classic modern example of a “virtuous pagan” – a man who, if God saves Jerry Falwell and condemns him on the basis of “accepting Christ,” God is being unjust in men’s eyes in damning.
I adopt the principle, myself, that any person who endeavors to know God through Christ, however he may conceive them, and calls himself a Christian, deserves to be considered one. AFAIAC, you can be Tiger Woods or Sammy Davis Jr., and if you want to put on a kilt and eat haggis, I won’t say you’re not a true Scotsman! 
Polycarp
I outlined some of the reasons as to why he never became a Christian. The reason you hypothesize sounds suspicious to me as he was not a man susceptible to prejudice. In his autobiography, he wrote of some issues he had with the religion, that is, if you expand the definition of religion to encompass its cultural facet. Later tonight, I will try to get some relevant quotes from his autobiography.
GOM and others, this article appeared in Episcopal Life, the national monthly newspaper for The Episcopal Church, on Spong’s retirement in the January 2000 issue. Quote pertinent to Spong-as-Christian: