Sadly, nobody would read his books if he weren't the "bishop who doesn't believe what the Church proclaims."
In a recent essay he writes:
- "... citizens of the 21st Century cannot twist their minds into First Century pretzels in order to say “I believe” to the traditional explanations offered by the biblical writers. Rather I seek the reality of the Jesus experience that made these explanations seem appropriate."
- "I do not believe, for example, that Jesus was born of a virgin in any biological sense, but I do believe that people found in Jesus a God presence that caused them to assert that human life could never have produced what they believed they met in him."
- "I do not believe that the deceased body of Jesus was resuscitated physically on the third day and was restored to the life of this world as, at least, the later gospels assert, but I do believe that in him and through him people found a way into that which is eternal and so they portrayed him as breaking through and transcending the limits of death."
- "I do not believe that Jesus defied gravity to ascend into the heavens of a three-tiered universe to be reunited with the God who lives above the sky, but I do believe that Jesus opened the door to that realm in which life can become so whole and so fully human that we enter God’s divinity and God’s presence in a new way."
- "I do not believe that 50 days after the Easter experience the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples as a might rushing wind, accompanied by tongues of fire, as the Pentecost story in the Book of Acts relates, but I do believe that when we are open to God’s eternal presence we are also open to see another so deeply that tribal identities fall and we can communicate with one another in the universal language of love and discover that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, but a new humanity."
- As Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer once observed, I do not believe that Christianity can today be contained inside the traditional formulations of Christianity and must, therefore, transcend these boundaries, if it is to live in this generation. Bonhoeffer coined the phrase “Religionless Christianity” to describe what he meant. I seek in a similar way to look at Jesus outside the boundaries of religion.
- The Easter Jesus is, I believe, the limitless Jesus, the one in whom full divinity flows, not destroying but affirming his humanity, the Jesus who can command the attention of a world that is not only weary of war, but weary of religion also, especially when it seems to be a cause of war.
To be sure, Spong is not the first Anglican, let alone Anglican prelate, to dispute the traditional proclamation. It is also worth saying that the things he does not believe in, are not necessarily what the Church proclaims.
As regards the virgin birth of Jesus, what we believe is that the Incarnation came by power of the Holy Spirit in conjunction with the assent of Mary. He says he doesn't believe it in 'any biological sense.' Of course the Church's proclamation is rooted in the notion of the possibility of the miraculous. We believe that God did a new thing, and it was the parthenogenesis of Jesus from the Blessed Virgin Mary (as we traditionally revere her.) I don't believe this was a typical event, obviously, but rather a unique event. Though, to be sure, I believe that God is the one who made the universe ex nihilo. As such, I do believe that the emergence of new phenomena in the universe at the instigation of God is not merely possible, but to be expected of the God who creates from nothing. Moreover, this doesn't appear to be that big a 'trick,' in the biological sense, given that there are thousands of parthenogenetic events each day, in thousands of species, naturally.As regards the physical 'resuscitation' - this is not exactly what is believed in Resurrection either. The physical part is believed, but the 'resuscitation' part is not. We believe the risen Lord had a full presence, which includes all aspects of realness -- physical, spiritual, etc. Of course this is itself proclaimed in the so-called 'later' Gospels, with the different ways in which the Risen Christ was perceived.
Spong's use of the word 'later Gospels,' clearly refers to the idea that Mark was written first, and the other three afterwards. He suggests that Mark, without its resurrection accounts, merely the empty tomb, has 'got the story right', but the 'later' Gospels add to it with later developments. This is ironic on the one-hand, and not necessarily factual on the other. It is ironic, because Spong's hero, as he has long said, was John A. T. Robinson - whose famous work "Honest To God" created the shocking mold that Spong filled. Robinson, however, a true scholar, believed that the Gospels, and all the letters of the New Testament, with the exception maybe of one, were composed before 70 A.D., and that John's gospel was possibly first. Apart from Robinson's challenge to critical orthodoxy, it continues to be normatively understood that the letters of Paul were written before even Mark, and Paul does speak to resurrection bodies. Again, not as mere 'resuscitation,' but as 'real.'
The Ascension was certainly also a stupifying event, as with the incarnation and resurrection, and escapes normal understanding. But, as with Pentecost, all of these events are about what we would normally call the 'miraculous.' Spong's key presupposition is that miracles cannot happen. He takes this straight from Spinoza, and all who followed in the modernist trajectory. His entire theology presupposes this, and goes from there. But what if they can and do happen? What if the God of all things can do things that boggle our minds, and go against our suppositions of logic and what we think we know?
On the one hand, Spong grasps the power of the human imagination and the beauty of wonderment at new possibilities. Why on the other does he insist on the limits of God's imagination and new possibilities, and that they just might emerge from within nature just as nature itself has emerged from nothing?
As regards his use of Bonhoeffer's phrase, 'religionless Christianity,' it is frustrating to hear Bishop Spong do so, in nearly every book. What Spong suggests is simply not what Bonhoeffer was talking about. Stanley Hauerwas, who knows just a thing or two about Bonhoeffer, would almost certainly eat Jack Spong up on this one. (Also an anti-war figure to say the least.)
The ultimate sadness of the Spongian trajectory is that he claims to be 'with it' in the 21st century. Yet, the post-Modern has much less trouble with the idea that the universe is very strange indeed, and that stuff happens beyond our own logic and knowledge anyway -- let alone if and when God might choose to interact however God chooses.
5 comments:
My biggest complaint about Spong is that far too many of the ordinary Episcopalians I know think that he speaks on behalf of the church and expresses what the church teaches. Other than that I have no real problem with the "gossip tabloids" quality of his scholarship. It can be quite entertaining at times.
Thanks for these words. Your reference to the post-Modern in the last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter, I believe. I think that Bp. Spong is the archetypal Modernist, and in a sense representative of the end of that era. In a way he is a kind of empiricist who paradoxically resists the objectivism he is anchored in.
I think it was Phyllis Trible who said that the last 500 years of Christianity in the West can be book-ended by Martin Luther at the earlier end and Jack Spong at this one. We are entering a new era of western Christianity marked by the movement called the emerging church, she holds. Certainly, in my view, we are in a major transition period, and what will "emerge" is not yet clear to this observer.
One way of understanding Bp. Spong is that he is reaching out to the unchurched modernists who have rejected the Myth (in the postive sense of the Truth) to tell them, "Hey, there is a deeper truth beyond the literalism (of the Bultmannian biblical universe) that you can embrace." Christianity must change or die. But history tells us that Christianity always changes. Will it move beyond the problem +Spong diagnoses? Likely so. Will it shatter further into new forms of first-world and old forms of third-world? (If those terms have any meaning anymore.) It appears so. Will the many worlds of Christianity become in the post-modern deconstructionist way incommensurable? No time ofr anxious souls.
Sadly, in his often senasationalist way of poutting things, +Spong has alienated a lot of the faithful. And he has become a useful weapon to the dissidents who "spong" whomever they are unhappy with in the leadership of TEC.
I've always thought that the main problem with +Spong was his profound lack of imagination. He doesn't seem to believe that reality ever differs from what goes on in his necessarily limited experience.
Spong's worst fault, IMO, is being dull.
(However, I do believe he has been a very productive and necessary gadfly when it comes to societal and especially church policies in re: "justice" issues, as you suggest.
He doesn't really have a "theology," though; he doesn't propose anything new. He only knows what he doesn't like - but in terms of theology, there just isn't any there, there.)
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