Louisville Process Theology Network

John Shelby Spong's Religion II

Nov 13, 2009

Question from the audience: My question is -- what's your understanding of the purpose of Jesus' death? Why do you believe he died?

Bishop Spong: That's a question that's profound and worthwhile but it is very difficult to answer in a very few minutes. So let me sort of just talk about the parameters of that. I'd like for the Christian church to get away from the idea that Jesus is a sacrifice to pay the price of the sins of the world.

I'd like first to get away from that idea because I don't think that gives us a very good image of God.

As a blood offering and a human sacrifice before this god can reach out in forgiveness to God's own creation, strikes me as a strange god indeed. I'm not even excited about animal sacrifice, to say nothing of human sacrifice. And so this whole image I find a bit repelling.

I find it strange that in the Christian tradition we have made a fetish out of Jesus blood. In the Protestant tradition we sing hymns to the blood of Jesus. We sing hymns about being washed in the blood and saved by the blood and there's a fountain filled with blood. And in the Catholic tradition we talk about drinking the blood, to sort of make ourselves become the recipients of the saving gift of Christ.

I think the purpose of the life and indeed of the death of Jesus is to help us to become more fully human.

To touch us, to call us to empower us to step beyond our boundaries. And our boundaries are the things that we have wrapped around ourselves so that we could survive the evolutionary process.We are all products of this evolutionary process.

We are all survivors of this evolutionary process, and we have survived by wrapping security systems around us, tribe and prejudice and gender superiority, and even our religion.

And I think as long as those are our security systems we will not touch the essence of life that I think Jesus came to bring and to empower.

So I look for a different way to tell the Christ story. And I think we've got to find a different way. The Christ calls me to be human. He doesn't rescue me from my sin; he enables me to become something I've never been able to be before.

I do not define human life as fallen sinner; I define human life as incomplete and therefore threatening everybody else with the fears that rise out of my incompleteness. How you treat the death of Jesus in terms of that becomes something that would take us a long time to try to develop.

I seek to do that in a book that will be coming out next year. But it would be chapters to try to put it down into a simple solution.

Thank you. Yes sir.



Question from the audience: My question, I want to pick up on a phrase that was used in one of your writings that Jesus broke the boundary of death, as your explanation to the resurrection.

One of the marks of Christianity has been that it's a historical religion, which is that it's based on some events in history and of course the resurrection has been the key one.

Now I'm just wondering what to break the boundary of death means, and more importantly what would it have meant to first century people if the tomb was not empty. In what possible way would they have ever been convinced that Jesus had broken the boundary of death if his body was still there?


Bishop Spong: I regard the tomb tradition as part of what I would call the Jerusalem tradition; I think it's quite secondary. I think it develops later, and I'm not sure it has a thing to do with the resurrection.

And I'm joined in that by an awful lot of contemporary scripture scholars, including John Dominic Person who is probably the leading Jesus scholar in America today. How I can make that case briefly enough is again the difficulty.

When I wrote a book on the resurrection I identified things that I thought the scriptures point to that are fairly clear. I think they point to the fact that Galilee is the locale in which resurrection occurs, not Jerusalem. I find it rather interesting that the first gospel that has Jesus appear to his disciples, he appears in Galilee.

The first gospel to be written where Jesus never appears at all is Mark, but the messenger says he will appear in Galilee. I find it fascinating that when Luke writes his story in the late 80's or early 90's, that he says it was never in Galilee, it was only in Jerusalem. And then when John comes along in the middle of the 10th decade, John says it was in Jerusalem first but it happened much later in Galilee.

But I think if you search the scriptures carefully you will find that Galilee is the primary setting in which whatever the resurrection experience was that transformed the disciples, when Jesus says, is said to predict what the disciples would do he says you will all forsake me, each to his own home. Their home was Galilee. So if they forsook Jesus for their own home, they went back to Galilee.

The power of the resurrection to me is the disciples who had forsaken Jesus when he was arrested and had fled in fear, get reconstituted with enormous power and enormous integrity and they die for the vision that they believe is absolutely real. They also were Jewish men.

The twelve disciples were all Jewish men. We've been taught from the moment they were rocked in the cradle that God was one and there was no other god and nothing other than God could be acknowledged as sacred.

And yet something happened to these Jewish men, following the crucifixion of Jesus, which so deeply convinced them that God and Jesus were intimately related. That they could no longer think of Jesus without thinking of God with Jesus. They could no longer think of God without thinking of Jesus with God. I don't think that's got a thing to do with empty tombs. I think that's a powerful life-changing experience.

And finally, the earliest record we have of the resurrection is Paul's letter to the Corinthians which is written in the mid 50's, 55/56. And Paul gives a list of the people to whom the appearances have taken place. I don't think those are physical appearances but that would have taken a little longer to go back in Napoleon Corpus and try to document that.

But what he says is, that the list of people to whom this god experience has come, this living Jesus has been made manifest, are first Cephas, that's Peter, then the twelve. I think that's interesting because Paul doesn't seem to know that one of the twelve was the traitor. Paul has the twelve there to receive the risen Lord; presumably including Judas?….

And then he says it was to 500 brethren at once, and then he says it was to James. And there's a lot of debate as to which of the three James' that is. The consensus is that's James the brother of Jesus. And then to the apostles, and there's a lot of funny debate about that because he's already named the twelve, so we're not really sure who the apostles are.

But then he says, last of all he appeared to me. I don't know anybody that thinks that the appearance of the risen Christ to Jesus, I mean to Paul was a physical resuscitated body.

Even Luke, making that story in the book of Acts which he didn't write until the 10th decade and Paul had been dead for 30/35 years and had no chance to sort of correct Luke if Luke was wrong. But even Luke at that point describes the resurrection experience that Paul says he had, as a sort of theophanis vision of the living Christ as part of who God is.

That's where I'd like to put the emphasis. When Paul says, if you then are risen with Christ you will seek those things which are above where Christ is part of whom God is, sitting at the right hand he said. Please recognize that that verse in Paul was written 35 years before the story of the ascension of Jesus actually entered the Christian story. So that he's not referring to that.

He's referring to what he thought was the resurrection. Paul's resurrection concept I believe is that God raised Jesus from death into part of who God is, and it was out of God that he appeared to certain chosen witnesses. So I'm not concerned about empty tombs or any of what I call secondary late developing evidence for the resurrection.


Continuted in the next post.