John Shelby Spong's "Jesus for the Non-Religious"

I've always had a passion for theology and history. The quest for the "historical Jesus" has been an interest from childhood. Spong's "Jesus for the Non-Religious" is the latest of many books I've read. I picked it up because of the title. It intrigued me.

Part I of the book examines -- from a modern scientific viewpoint -- what we can know of the story presented in the New Testament. A lot of what he presents has been presented before. Some of his interpretations are newish. But I enjoy the thrill of the story that he develops. It is very well presented. After examining and interpreting the evidence, here is the major conclusion of Part I of the book:

The first stage of our faith journey, the clearing out of distortions in the way we view the Jesus story, is now complete. The literalness of centuries of misinterpretation of the Jesus story has been broken open. The pieces lie before us in frightening array. Jesus was born in a perfectly normal way in Nazareth. His mother was not the icon of virgin purity. His earthly father, Joseph, was a literary creation. His family thought he was out of his mind. He probably did not have twelve male disciples. He had disciples who were both male and female. He did not command nature to obey him. He did not in any literal sense give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf or wholeness to the paralyzed and infirm. He did not raise the dead. There was no stylized Last Supper in which bread was identified with his broken body and wine with his poured-out shed blood designed to symbolize his final prediction of death. There was no betrayal and no romance connected with cross, no thieves, no cry of thirst and no darkness at noon. There was no tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea, no earthquake, no angel who rolled back the stone. There was no resuscitated body that emerged from that tomb on the third day, no touching of the wounds of Jesus, no opening by him of the secrets of scripture. Finally, there was no ascension into a heaven that exists above the sky.

Part III of the book constructs Spong's vision of "Jesus for the non-religious". But to do that he needs to point out that religion has taken the message and turned it negative within its "theistic" framework:

I observe first the fact that for some nineteen hundred years institutional Christianity lived comfortably with prejudices based on gender, race and sexual orientation. With the emergence of the twentieth century, however, Christianity started to fade precipitously, beginning in Europe and spreading to the United States. Power shifted dramatically from institutional Christianity to a rising, vigorous, secular humanism. It was this secular spirit that proceeded to rout the prejudices with which Christianity had accommodated itself for so long. This enabled the twentieth century to become the most dramatic century in human history for the rise of human rights. ...

My question is: Why did these enormous transformations of consciousness take place only when Christianity receded and secularism rose to replace it? Why was institutional Christianity unwilling to challenge these dehumanizing practices when they had to power to do so? ... Why is it still true that the largest expressions of institutional Christianity continue their relentless battle against the full equality of women in both church and society? Why do Christian leaders in the highest places still today seek to wrest from these newly emancipated women the power to make decisions about their own bodies? Why is the most segregated hour in American today still the hour of worship? Why is the strongest bastion of homophobia in the developed world today still the Christian church? What is there about Christianity, organized as it is today around the concept of a theistic God, that seems to require a perpetual victim? ...

Scrape away from traditional Christian teaching the piety and the stained-glass attitudes, and one finds cesspools of anger, boiling cauldrons that have ignited religious violence in every generation. Christians need to own this part of their history. ...

Today's church spends its energy in losing battles about such things as authority, scripture, women, sexuality and homosexuality, about which its history reveals it knows very little.

I thoroughly enjoy Spong's deconstruction of the religion around Jesus, but in the end I don't understand why he doesn't just let go and admit that Jesus was an interesting historical figure. Instead he wants to cling to a remnant religiosity built on some mystery of "Ground of Being" and other mumbo-jumbo. I enjoy this pantheism and his iconoclasm, but I don't buy into his attempt to save Jesus for a special pedestal. I accept his death of religion, but I reject his new dawning centred on this repurposed Jesus:

The religion called Christianity is dying, the casualty of an expanded worldview. The God experience in Jesus -- that experience upon which Christianity was built -- is newly dawning and will in time create new forms through which that new vision can live. Once Jesus is freed from the prison of religion, a renaissance and a reformation are possible. Jesus for the non-religious comes into view.

I don't understand why Spong doesn't just move over to Unitarianism which, to me, seems the essence of his current beliefs.

Here is a bit from a decidedly negative review of Spong's book by the blogger Ben Myers:

... Spong’s interpretation of the Gospel texts often rests on outdated research and flawed interpretations of the scholarship. And he misses the mark when he insists on a rigid dichotomy between faith and history. ...

The Jesus who emerges from these pages is ultimately indistinguishable from any other respectably innocuous, politically correct member of the Western middle classes. ...

Bishop Spong’s Jesus may be useful and consoling, then, but he is not especially interesting, much less unique. He poses no threat, no challenge. He makes no demands. He tells us nothing that we didn’t know already. And for just that reason, it’s hard to see why “the non-religious” – or anyone else, for that matter – should have any special regard for this Jesus.

I accept the thrust of Myers critique, but I feel offended by the viciousness of Myers' attack. Myers strikes me as someone who is jealously fighting a rearguard action to preserve the very dying religion that Spong has described.

One final comment: For me, one of the great joys of reading Spong's book was his honesty about race relations of the US's Deep South and how it poisoned the community in which he was raised, specifically North Carolina. He calls out the ugly side of zealots who use religion to cover-up or justify their dirty little deeds. This resonated with me. When I was an adolescent the youth minister of our church came to us after fleeing his home in Alabama. The local KKK had burned a cross in his yard giving him a warning. He got "the message" and gathered up his two very young children and his wife, and he fled well over a thousand miles to get away from the pieties of these "religious conservatives" of the Deep South (now known as fundamentalists). This once slave-based society was busy in the 1960s blowing up black churches killing young girls, turning police dogs and billy club-wielding police loose on unarmed protestors, grabbing "uppity" young blacks and lynching them, and seizing civil rights workers in the middle of the night to kill and bury them deep in the back woods. Spong is right to point out the hypocrisy of such a "deeply religious" society of the Deep South, a society which harboured vicious racism. Spong's personal story reminds me of why I distanced myself from "organized" religion.

So... For me, the book is well worth the read for two reasons:

1. It is an excellent tour of how the Gospels are in fact a constructed story. He shows how sophisticated the understanding of the Bible has become as a result of two hundred years of scholars freely analyzing the text unhampered by orthodoxies.
2. You get a peek into the US Deep South and a sense of how religion aids hypocrites in acting exactly contrary to the very teachings of the Book they claim to hold dear.