What the Gun Debate Reveals about the Republican Party and Political Leadership

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 18 April 2013 4 Comments
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Question

I read your title Liberating the Gospels some time ago which I found "liberating." I wonder, when all the layers are peeled from the gospels, I'm not sure I fully understand what is left in the Christian story to grasp. When we strip everything away is there an eternal truth left to motivate us? When you deconstruct a story so totally, what remains? Look forward to your words which will, no doubt, be wise.

Answer

Dear Nicki,

Yours is a good question, but I believe the wrong question. If what we have in the gospels is an interpretation of Jesus, written from a time two to three generations after his death and in a language Jesus never spoke, as I am certain was the case, then the question we need to ask is what gave that writing its power? If the story was not literal history to begin with is anything lost when we discover that it was not literal history? That is the situation we are in today. Since the early fourth century, out of both ignorance and prejudice, we have pretended that the gospels were biographies of the things Jesus said and did. Now we know they are highly interpretive works of some Jewish artists who mined the Hebrew Scriptures for stories about Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Solomon, Isaiah and many other parts of what we call the Old Testament in order to wrap these stories around Jesus of Nazareth. It would take far more space than this question and answer format would allow to document this conclusion with adequate data. That is what I did in some 300 pages in the book to which you have referred: Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes. That is still my favorite book of all that I have written and it was the book in which my study of the gospels was broken open to new levels of understanding.

It is not what is left that should be our concern, but why were these gospels written in this way at the beginning? That is the question that drives us to look behind the gospels and try to discover the experience that they had with Jesus, which required the interpretation these early writers put upon that experience. What was the source of that life-changing power that they believed they found in him? In that experience, life was expanded to new dimensions. When they tried to explain that experience, all they could finally say was somehow, through some means in that special life, they had met, encountered and known the meaning of God. The job of the church is to keep that experience alive by watching it lower barriers and expand life today.

I do not throw away or abandon a great piece of art because it does not literally portray the meaning of its subject. I move deeply into that piece of art to discover the power to which the artist is seeking to bear witness. That is also how the Bible is to be read. Its value grows rather than diminishes when it is approached this way. It is institutional Christianity that has for so long defended a literal Bible that feels bereft. It is not the lives of those who can now respond to a non-literal view of the Bible.

My best,

John Shelby Spong

 

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