"Think Different–Accept Uncertainty" Part XVIII: The Resurrection of Jesus

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 4 October 2012 1 Comments
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Question

Your theology is intriguing but I have many questions.  Two are: If Jesus Christ is not the incarnate divine one then who or what is he?  If Jesus Christ is not the incarnate divine one then what is the significance of naming yourself a Christian?

 

 

Answer

Dear Pastor Dan,

Thank you for your questions.  I fear, however, that the categories of theological understanding in which you frame your two questions are far too rigid and even dated for you to be able to hear the responses that I need to make to them.  You are using the language of Greek dualism in which the creeds were hammered out in the fourth century when Christianity was in the process of being incorporated into a Greek thinking world. Incarnation is a Greek term not a biblical term. Fourth Century concepts have frozen Christianity into something neither Paul nor the gospel writers would ever have recognized.  I spent over 300 pages trying to separate the Jesus experience from this creedal language in my book entitled Jesus for the Non-Religious: Discovering the Divine in the Heart of the Human.  It is not an easy or simplistic task, but it means that in the way you frame your questions it is all but impossible for me to respond in a meaningful way.

We Christians have made many claims for Jesus.  There is general agreement even in the Bible that “God was in this Christ.” What that means and how God and Jesus came to be viewed as related to each other in a deep and even total way is not nearly as clear as the affirmation we make about him.

If you go to the New Testament, you will discover that the earliest affirmation about Jesus that we have in that book is that in his humanity the presence of God has been experienced as real.  “God was in Christ” was the way Paul described that experience.

Since the only way first century people could understand God was in the common definition as a supernatural being who lived above the sky, the only way the debate was framed was about how this distant God could have gotten into the human Jesus.  The debate is easy to follow.

Paul, writing to the Romans about 58 CE, said that God lifted Jesus into the meaning of God at the Resurrection (Rom. 1:1-4).  Mark, writing 12-14 years later, says that God entered the fully human Jesus at the time of his baptism.  Matthew, writing somewhere between 82-85, and Luke, writing between 88-93, say that God entered Jesus at the moment of his conception.  That was when the Virgin Birth stories entered the tradition.  The Fourth Gospel, written between 95-100, agreed that Jesus was part of who God is, but argued that it had been so from the dawn of creation.  Jesus was for him was the enfleshment of the word or logos of God that came out of God when God said: “Let there be light.” All of these explanations, conflicting as they are, are written into pages of the New Testament.

It is not the explanation of how God became human that I regard as important, it is the reality of the human experience that the explanations seek to explain.  In the mystical tradition, the union of the human with the divine is said to be the goal of life.  Humanity is not destroyed by the presence of God, it is expanded.  Divinity is not the opposite of humanity it is an expression of humanity’s fullness.  Divinity does not take over our humanity or even Jesus’ humanity; it becomes the depth expression of who we are.  Incarnation language is the language of the Greek world.  It served the church well in the past, but it cannot be the language of the 21st century.  Our task is to find a way to express the same truth that the concept of “incarnation” sought to convey, but in the language of our world. That is my goal in ministry and it is the reality of that goal that makes me a Christian.

My best to you in your ministry.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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