The Chalice Abbey: A Unique Ministry in Amarillo, Texas

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 1 August 2013 3 Comments
Please login with your account to read this essay.
 

Question

Have there been any people since Jesus who seemed similarly to be “God infused?” If so, who? If not, do you believe it is possible for me to evolve into the kind of selflessness that we see in Jesus?

Answer

Dear Susan,

Your question raises many others and reveals a pattern that needs to be broken open. How do we define God? Is God other than human? Is God a being, somehow akin or related to my being? Is the difference between humanity and divinity a difference in kind or in degree?

The “orthodox” position within Christianity is that Jesus is unique, different in kind from anyone who has lived before. Theologians like Paul Tillich, who died in 1965, would argue strongly against that notion. Other theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John A. T. Robinson are in agreement on the possibility that Jesus is different from others only in degree, not in kind. This conviction in turn opens up the potential for there to be many other “Christs,” both in the world today and throughout history. The Tillich/Bonhoeffer/Robinson point of view is certainly not new and can be located as a minority point of view dating back to the writings of Meister Eckhart in the 14th century. The creedal thinking that arose in the 4th and 5th centuries and produced the doctrines of the Incarnation first and the Holy Trinity second, tended to lock Christianity into the position of seeing Jesus as a unique, special life that somehow shared ontologically in the nature of God. That position, however, depended on a theistic definition of God. God in that era was clearly defined as a being who lived somewhere external to this world, who possessed supernatural power and who could and did regularly invade human history in miraculous ways. The life of Jesus was considered to be simply one of those divine interventions.

This traditional point of view probably made sense before people like Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th and 17th centuries, opened human knowledge to embrace the vastness of space. That discovery, in turn, stripped the planet Earth of its pretentious claim to be the center of a three-tiered universe. That theological understanding probably also made sense before Isaac Newton de-mystified the operations of natural law and, thus, largely removed both miracle and magic from our working vocabularies. If Christianity is wedded to the Council of Nicaea’s Fourth Century understanding of Christian theology, there is little future in Christianity itself. Fourth century people simply could not and did not operate inside our understanding of how the world operates.

If, however, we recognize that behind every human experience there is a time bound explanation, we are free to reject the explanations of antiquity and to pursue a new way of understanding the original Christ experience. It is there that I believe we come to an opportunity to reverse the traditional conclusions without dismissing the truth of the experience and to initiate a new theological process. Among the questions that must be admitted is that perhaps God does not so much invade the human in Jesus, but that the human grows into the divine. That possibility opens up Christology to all kinds of new conclusions. The fact that Jesus differs from us only in degree, not in kind, is one of them.

At one point in the development of the concept of messiah among the Jews, the messianic idea meant any life through whom the word of God is heard or in whom the will of God is lived out. Such a life could then be seen as “messiah” and could thus be called “the Christ.” That Christ principle has been seen many times in human history. I think of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela as examples of those who lived for others in this Christ-like way. Each of these persons would be surprised at that designation, but I think the time has come to separate the Christ principle from a single life and begin to see it as a God presence that can be lived out in various degrees. Jesus remains for me the standard of judgment because our recognition of the Christ presence in others is based on the Christ presence in Jesus of Nazareth.

Thank you for your question.

John Shelby Spong

 

Comments

 

3 thoughts on “The Chalice Abbey: A Unique Ministry in Amarillo, Texas

  1. WordPress › Error

    There has been a critical error on this website.

    Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.