Doug Muder’s notes on Why Christianity Must Change or Die by John Shelby Spong

In Chapters 5-8 Spong deconstructs and reconstructs the role of Jesus in Christianity.

5. Discovering Anew the Jesus of the New Testament

Can Jesus be lifted out of this ancient theological context and still be Lord or Christ for anyone? ... Is there some other way to understand these Jesus stories and the doctrines that are said to have been based on them? Can any postmodern person take these literal, premodern claims seriously? Can Christianity continue without them?-- p 71-72

Spong prefaces his look at Jesus by observing that the gospels are not the word of God, that they contain contradictions and biases, that they are not eye-witness accounts, they are not contemporary to Jesus, and they were written in historical contexts that shaped their content. He asserts that the virgin birth and resurrection stories are later additions, and that the identification of Jesus with God also developed later.

The earliest Christian writings (Paul's) were ecstatic and mystical. Only later did explanation become necessary.

If one asserts that "God was in this Christ" as Paul does, then the question inevitably arises as to how the holy and distant God happened to be present in that finite and particular life. If that question cannot be answered adequately, the experience comes to be regarded only as a kind of private delusion. So explanation always follows proclamation, but not quite immediately. The ecstasy, early on, defies explanation. The very moment we move from ecstatic proclamation to explanation, the presuppositions, definitions, and stereotypes of the ages begin to shape our words. That is inescapable. That is also why theological explanations can never be literally true or eternally applicable. Despite institutional religious claims to the contrary, creeds and theology are nothing but explanations. So they are inevitably distorted versions of truth warped by the time in which they were articulated. -- p 74-75

The rest of this chapter traces the course of Jesus' deification. It begins with Paul's claim that Jesus was adopted by God at the time of his resurrection. When Mark writes the first gospel, the Spirit descends on Jesus earlier, at his baptism. Matthew's later gospel moves the proclamation of Jesus' divine nature into the story of his birth. John pushed it back further, to the beginning of time.

Once we can establish that biblical interpretations are different from people's original experience of Jesus, then we can begin to explore the deeper question: What was the nature of that experience? What was there about Jesus of Nazareth that made his first-century disciples assert the astonishing claim that "God was in this Christ"? Can we separate the experience from the explanation? -- p 82

6. Jesus as Rescuer: An Image That Has to Go

Chapter 6 gives the history of the doctrine that Jesus is the savior who was crucified as a sacrifice to atone for all human sin. In this doctrine, the perfection of creation was marred by the first sin of Adam and Eve. The guilt of this sin has been passed down to all people, and the sacrifice of a sinless being was necessary to take this guilt from us.

It was the conviction that humans were sinful and in need of redemption that enabled guilt and religion to be so closely tied together in the history of the Western world. The power of Western religion has always rested on the ability of religious people to understand and to manipulate that sense of human inadequacy that expresses itself as guilt. -- p 90

This view of Christianity is increasingly difficult for many of us to accept or believe. I would choose to loathe rather than to worship a deity who required the sacrifice of his son. But on many other levels as well, this entire theological system, with these strange presuppositions, has completely unraveled in our postmodern world. It now needs to be removed quite consciously from Christianity. -- p 95

Spong outlines the unraveling of this doctrine with the same care that he gave to its development. First, evolution removed the concept of a first pair of humans, as well as the notion of an original perfection. Finally, the notion of blood sacrifice has become distant to us, and when we are forced to conceive of it, it seems barbaric.

We human beings do not live in sin. We are not born in sin. We do not need to have the stain of our original sin washed away in baptism. We are not fallen creatures who will lose salvation if we are not baptized. We have rather emerged out of our evolutionary past, and we are still being formed. Our lack of wholeness is a sign of the baggage we carry as survivors of that long, difficult past. ... When any of us gets caught in a battle for survival, even now our higher instincts still collapse and our radical self-centeredness causes us to engage in a tooth-and-claw struggle all over again. That is quite simply a description of our being. That is what it means to be human.

A savior who restores us to our prefallen status is therefore a pre-Darwinian superstition and post-Darwinian nonsense. A supernatural redeemer who enters our fallen world to restore creation is a theistic myth. So we must free Jesus from the rescuer role. Yet so totally has he been captured by this understanding that most of us know of no other way to speak of him except to reduce him to a good teacher or a good example. Had the Christ experience been no more than that, I doubt seriously if it would have survived. -- p 99

7. The Christ as Spirit Person

Spong begins with the earliest known Christian writings, those of Paul. Paul frequently uses the word spirit in connection with Jesus, and Spong attempts to grasp what that might have meant. The answers he comes up with are very much like the nontheistic God images of Chapter 4.

Spirit was the depth dimension of human life, Paul was arguing [in 1 Corinthians], and even more, spirit was the depth dimension of God's divine life. It was a breathtaking concept. The same spirit, which is of God, is also within us. -- p 103

[By describing the body as the temple of the holy spirit] Paul was now suggesting that a new dwelling place for God might be not beyond the sky, but within each of us. In these words Paul was groping for a way to make rational sense out of his experience that in the human Jesus, God had been perceived to be dwelling on this earth in a dramatically new way, and the God in this Jesus had somehow made contact with the God who was within Paul. ... It was Paul's radical suggestion that in Jesus, God and human life were now seen to flow together. This startling conclusion revealed how deeply Paul was struggling to find a nontheistic definition for God that would account for what he believed he had met in the Christ. -- p 103-104

Pages 107-116 cover how the gospel writers used symbolic religious language to convey this new experience of God.

This point must be heard: the Gospels are first-century narrations based on first-century interpretations. Therefore they are a first-century filtering of the experience of Jesus. They have never been other than that. We must read them today not to discover the literal truth about Jesus, but rather to be led into the Jesus experience they were seeking to convey. That experience always lies behind the distortions, which are inevitable because words are limited. ... Let it be clearly stated, the Gospels are not in any literal sense holy, they are not accurate, and they are not to be confused with reality. They are rather beautiful portraits painted by first-century Jewish artists, designed to point the reader toward that which is in fact holy, accurate, and real. -- p 107-108

By drawing on their sacred history, these first-century Jewish folk found the words to talk about the God presence they had met in Jesus. They knew no God except a God defined as an external being with supernatural power, and so they described the God presence they met in Jesus in the only God language they knew how to use. God had come down by spiritual conception or by an outpouring of heavenly spirit upon him. Jesus was a spirit person, a window into the holy, an incarnation of the divine. -- p 112

So I start with that insight. I assert that Jesus is a spirit person, a God presence, and this assertion becomes my point of entry into his meaning. Beyond the boundaries of theism, which have limited us for so long, we discover a startling revelation of God at the very center of human life, and Jesus, the spirit person, stands at the heart of that revelation. ... With this nontheistic clue ... we now are ready to enter the Gospel stories anew and to roam within them beneath their literalness. We are not looking for the external descriptions, the signs of a God who has come down. Instead we are searching for a humanity though which the meaning of God, who is in the midst of life, might be revealed. -- p 117

8. What Think Ye of Him? Where the Human Enters the Divine

Is anything left by which to commend this Jesus, not just his teaching, to our postmodern world? -- p 119

Why, [my critics] ask, would I or anyone else engage in this tortuous process of recasting, rethinking, reinterpreting, and revisioning? ... I enter this process because I can neither dismiss this Christ nor live comfortably with the way he has been traditionally interpreted. ... I still find the power of the Christ compelling. -- p 119

When the theological structures of antiquity, which were wrapped so tightly around him, collapse, as I believe they are doing in this generation, these questions will still force us to search amid the wreckage for the meaning of this Jesus. We will continue to look for that revelatory moment that people experienced in him, for that flash of wonder that drove them to their God language, and for that substance upon which the whole theistic theological superstructure of doctrine, dogma, and creeds would later be erected. -- p 121

Pages 122-125 list examples from the gospels in which Jesus breaks the boundaries that separate people from each other.

Beneath the God claims made for this Jesus was a person who lived a message announcing that there was no status defined by religion, by tribe, by culture, by cult, by ritual, or by illness that could separate any person from the love of God. ... It was as if his source of love lay beyond every human boundary. It was inexhaustible. It was life giving. Finally, when it was noticed, it was thought to be so deeply the meaning of God that the assumption was made that the love present in the life of this Jesus was the result of an external deity who had somehow entered into him. -- p 125

He possessed an unearthly capacity to be present, totally present, to another person. ... His humanity was also portrayed as able to manifest that essential, but rare, quality of true freedom, the freedom to be oneself under every set of circumstances. ... He was free to forgive, free to endure, free to be, and free to die. His being was not distorted by his external circumstances. -- p 125-127

It matters not whether any of these portrayals were literally accurate. They, in fact, recorded people's impressions of this person, and when the Gospel writers wrote them, they constituted riveting, unforgettable, rare glimpses into the depths of the humanity of this Jesus. There was clearly an enormous power present in his life. -- p 127

Here was a whole human being who lived fully, who loved wastefully, and who had the courage to be himself under every set of circumstances. He was thus a human portrait of the meaning of God, understood as the source of life, the source of love, and the ground of being. -- p 128-129

Human life is capable of entering the infinity of God because the infinity of God can be found in the heart of every human life. The two are not distinct. Humanity and divinity flow together. ... In the being of Jesus we see a revelation of the Ground of Being. In his life we see a revelation of the Source of Life. In his love we see a revelation of the Source of Love. These were the aspects of his human presence that made his life so awesome and so compelling that people were driven to speak about him in terms of the theistic images of antiquity. -- p 131

If transcendence can be translated as infinite depth, if immanence can be seen seen as the point of access to those depths, and if the Christ figure can be interpreted as the life where transcendence and immanence come together, then we have a new way of understanding the meaning of the Trinity. -- p 132

Jesus is for me the life who has made known to us all what the meaning of life is. So I call him "Lord," I call him "Christ," and I assert that this is where God is met for me. -- p 133