Monday, February 23, 2009

 

'What made Jesus different, I couldn't tell you'

John Shelby Spong in the Houston Chronicle:

Q: So you don’t believe Jesus is the son of God?

A: Well, I wouldn’t say it that way because I believe I meet God in Jesus. I think that Jesus was so completely and fully human that all that God is can flow through him without interruption. What made Jesus different, I couldn’t tell you. But I believe those around him were trying to say: "We’ve met something in Jesus that we didn’t think could ever have happened in human life."


I say that, as a Christian testimony, that's plenty. What say you?

Read the entire short Q&A.

--ER

Comments:
My favorite line: "The real mistake religion makes is to say that you are supposed to become religious. I think you are supposed to become more human." Reminds of the Great Confusion from "you know whos" at other blogs.

I think he terribly misdirects on denominations, though, when he traps them as ethnic tablecloth. That he goes on to say he sees good things cooking in Methodist and UCC pots belies his silence that a different denominational ethos can develop different new and creative approaches.

As long as a denomination is renewing itself.

{You post him 'cause he plugs the UCC... crazy bastard that he is.)
 
Ha! I just like the guy. I think he's one of the most honest people out there -- whether he's right or wrong is another issue. ... He did a workshop at my church once (which I had to miss, but got the CD), and he said at one point at the end of a rambling answer to a question: "At the end of the day even I don't believe everything I say!" ... I find myself agreeing with him more than disagreeing, though.
 
On the road again, leavin' Greater Houston here directly.

Feodor, I'll toot my horn in yer honor as a scholar, a gentleman, a Texan and bloggy friend, as we pass by Valley View. :-)
 
Echoing (not dittoing Feodor, I liked that line, and the whole answer that line comes from:
"Q: You talk of reordering Christianity. How can we do that?

A: I think you have to live it. I don’t think you can set out a blueprint, I think it’s a daily thing. The older I get, the more I’m convinced that it has to do with becoming more deeply and fully human. The real mistake religion makes is to say that you are supposed to become religious. I think you are supposed to become more human."

I realize there are people who are deeply offended by Spong. That's their problem.
 
"Well, I would’t say it that way because I believe I meet God in Jesus. I think that Jesus was so completely and fully human that all that God is can flow through him without interruption."

Hum. Jesus as a conduit of God? A perfect conduit of God. Well we are all a conduit of God. That is as best we can be.

" What made Jesus different, I couldn’t tell you."

Jesus was different perhaps because he was a metaphor, an example, a myth, of what we can become.
First we follow Christ and become a Christian and then we grow in knowledge to become like a Christ, and in spirit then to God. That would make Religion, all Religion, a barrier, a wall, an obstacle, between you and what you have to accomplish.

As an example:
"But I believe those around him were trying to say: "We’ve met something in Jesus that we didn’t think could ever have happened in human life.""

No one, not one single person, who personally knew Christ ever wrote one word about him. But why do we believe they did? Religions say so? It is Church Dogma?

Why did they not ever write one word? Why did have to wait to the second or third degree of acquaintence? Perhaps Jesus wasn't Christ until then or perhaps Jesus was never known by anyone.

Spong flirts with Gnosticism but seem reluctant to cross over. Just can't climb that wall our culture has constructed.
 
Well, I think he is unwilling to dismiss the church, since the church, for4 good, ill, schism, and catholicsm, has existed for so long it can't be ignored. And it should not be ignored.

And, for all the stripping down of the Jesus phenomenon, Spong admittedly can't ultimately reject the idea of Christ.

Ideas being what they are, both "mere" thoughts and grand expressions of reality, I resemble that remark.
 
ER: "...since the church....has existed for so long it can't be ignored. And it should not be ignored."

The literalist won the battle, thus they are honored as the winners. They have existed so long they can't be ignored. But they should be ignored for they are only the winners.


"And, for all the stripping down of the Jesus phenomenon, Spong admittedly can't ultimately reject the idea of Christ."

Is Jesus being stripped down, or clean off? Or is it that Spong can't contain the Idea Of Christ, and reject the winners' pale immitation?
 
Spong is indeed in the fix of a late modern Christian. Stripped of the Enlightenment grounds for an historical Christ, he makes recourse to a spiritualized/philosophized/mystical Jesus.

And he does pretty good with it for those of us committed to the church.

But there's the rub. Being committed to the church, gnosticism doesn't cover. For one, gnosticism is not a tradition, nor is there a core set of identifying beliefs held in common. Gnosticism was an historical movement like the passing New Age phenomenon. As someone in antiquity said, gnostics were like mushrooms: a different variety under every step.

But neither does Spong's Christology satisfy for life in the church principally convened on every commemorative day of Christ's resurrection to commune with him in the highest and lowest of liturgy and rhetoric.

How does a community have the strength to serve its world when worship is a continual question on the lips: Jesus, what have you to do with us?

Spong gives answers that make good and fairly spiritual Christian sense out of the last seventy years of historical-critical Biblical thinking. He does so in ways that comfort me at night and for my own general sense of self and my identity as a late modern Christian. But when I consider my identity in a group of christians with different needs, and my identity as a fallible moral emmissary, Spong leaves me without a raison d'être much different from the highest of humanism.

Which is not bad at all. And gets me very, very far.

But all the science in the world can quantify everything to me in a thousand thousand measurements regarding an easter egg.

And never get the experience.

The easter egg offends my isolated, individualistic modern ironic self.

But when, after forty days of fasting my isolated, individualistic, modern ironic self dry, the easter egg, my daughter, my wife, my parish, my city, my country, my cosmos and my christ almost cause a mysterious death of that self. And I feel happy about that. And I don't know why.

Happy Shrove Tuesday, fellas.
 
In other words, Spong needs an ecclesiology to go with his Christology. But he's not so good at that, or, at least, as convincing. And his Christology does not seem to me to be easily conjoined with a strong, vital ecclesiology.

Communal identity is not a natural conception of ourselves in this age. It may, in the next hundred years, prove to be a epochal reformation to understanding ourselves and, for Christians, the central, intuitive need for Christ.
 
"For one, gnosticism is not a tradition, nor is there a core set of identifying beliefs held in common. Gnosticism was an historical movement like the passing New Age phenomenon. As someone in antiquity said, gnostics were like mushrooms: a different variety under every step."

The winners do write the history after all, do they not. If Gnosticism was a "passing...phenomenon" then what were the Cathars doing still existing in the 13th century? Why did it take a Papal Crusade and the Inquisition to eliminate them?

No, I think their "core set of identifying beliefs held in common" are still there, buried in the Gospel attributed to John and in Paul's authentic writtings. They still haunt the established Church no matter what mushroom shapes it takes.

I'm not really an advocate for Gnosticism, although I may have some gnostic tendencies. As for what individuals need to live their lives and lift their Spirit, then whatever floats your boat will do so long as you don't sink those of the others.

Peace.
 
Come on, DRLBJ, you know this stuff better than I do. There was not a network of gnostic communities. Gnosticism was a diverse and fluid range of ideas that influenced many communities but formed not systemic one of its own. There were gnostic Jews, gnostic Christians, gnostic Zoroastrians, gnostic Mithraists (sp?), gnostic whatever. The Cathars were gnostic Christians, no? They were not the gnostic Gnostics.

If New Age sounds pejorative, how about, gnosticism was like modernism, post-modernism, Victorianism, a cultural phenomenon of a sensibility regarding how some thought of good and evil, influencing a previously given communal identity which was not disregarded but altered by a new framework of interpretation.

I didn't sink any boats because there is no boat.

An aside, one may understand a so-called "heresy" as a single focus on one truth only, and usually the truth that is being ignored at the time.
 
I've never really understood the appeal of Spong, for either side, as a hero or as a nemesis. I've read his books and they can be summed up as, "Fundamentalism = bad, so I'll believe the exact opposite and throw it all out."

Meh. I just don't find that very satisfying, nor terribly clever.

He probably serves his purpose though. As Lisa Simpson observes. "Everybody needs a nemesis. Sherlock Holmes had his Dr. Moriarty, Mountain Dew has its Mellow Yellow, even Maggie has that baby with the one eyebrow."
 
I think Spong's chief accomplishment lie in what he did as bishop, not what he's said since. BUT, what he's said since is a life-sustaining breath for certain people desperate to keep their faith but beset by ... everything.
 
Re, "Is Jesus being stripped down, or clean off? Or is it that Spong can't contain the Idea Of Christ, and reject the winners' pale immitation?"

I like.
 
"BUT, what he's said since is a life-sustaining breath for certain people desperate to keep their faith but beset by ... everything."

I'd buy that. Better they find something to believe than give it up entirely. Though personally it seems to me like Spong has given it up entirely, but kept the fancy dress and the sorta Jesusy talk. But hey, if people find some inspiration in what he's got to say, that's probably a good thing.
 
Feodor: "There was not a network of gnostic communities. Gnosticism was a diverse and fluid range of ideas that influenced many communities but formed not systemic one of its own."

Feodor just go read Irenaeus' "Against Heresy" in the Ante-Nicene Fathers Documents. He sure talks about a lot of Gnostic "communities" for there not to be any. Indeed, some would contend that most of Paul's Churchs were Gnostic congregations. Remember that the Literalist won and what you read about early Christian Gnostic's came only from them until 1946 and the recovery of the Gnostic documents from Nag Hammadi hidden for 1700 years from destruction by the Literalist.
As for the "Literalist" Church, it now has roughly 20,000 denominations, sects,etc., so much for a solid front.
You are correct that Gnosticism is found in all religions over all eras. Ever consider why? Think of it as sort a perennial spirit that grows everywhere.
 
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