On Teaching at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 21 August 2014 2 Comments
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Question

I read your answer your answer to a question from Ken Austin from Maroubra, Australia, and I was deeply moved. I understand and agree with all you said in your answer to Mr. Austin, but please go a little further (and forgive me if you’ve answered this before), but what did John mean to imply when he put the words in Jesus’ mouth, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me.” Exactly what is meant by that declaration?

Thanks for taking the time to answer the question.

Answer

Dear Shirma,

Yes, I have answered that question before, but it seems to keep coming year after year. It is one of those biblical texts which, over the centuries, has been used to validate a missionary imperialism and to denigrate the other religious traditions of the world. My experience is that whenever a person, a church, a denomination or a religion claims to possess the truth and thus be the only valid pathway to God, that person, that church, that denomination and that religion turns demonic. There is an incredible arrogance present when any human being or any religious tradition believes that it has cornered the market on the truth of God and can therefore judge anyone who disagrees with them as wrong, inadequate, heretical or whatever. To quote this text from John 14 to justify that concept also reveals little more than a profound biblical ignorance.

This Johannine text is in what we call the “farewell discourses” in that gospel, which constitute chapters 13-16. It reflects a struggle between the synagogue authorities and the Christian movement, which was until about 88 CE still a part of the synagogue. After the split which separated the synagogue from the church, various new claims were made for Jesus by his followers. Among these claims in John’s gospel was a series of sayings we now call the “I AM” sayings. No one other than the Fourth Gospel ever suggests that these “I AM” sayings were spoken by Jesus in history and most scholars assume that John wrote these words, not that Jesus ever said them.

“I AM” was the name of God revealed to Moses in the Exodus story of the burning bush. The synagogue authorities had declared that the followers of Jesus were outside the synagogue, outside the faith of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. The followers of Jesus countered that claim by saying that in Jesus they had found a new revelation of the God of Abraham and Moses and that the same God the Jews met in Abraham and Moses, the followers of Jesus had found present in Jesus. So they portrayed Jesus as the one in whom the life of God was newly revealed. It is the life of God in Jesus that we Christians dare to worship. Jesus is our gateway to understanding God, so we have said that to follow Jesus is to enter God. This was their counter claim hurled against the excommunicating Orthodox Jews, who dismissed them from the synagogue. It never occurred to that author of the Fourth Gospel that these words would someday be used as a weapon of religious imperialism.

I treat the “I AM” sayings more thoroughly in my book, The Fourth Gospel; Tales of a Jewish Mystic so that is as far as I can go in this brief format. The lesson one might learn from this text is that NO ONE should quote a text from the Bible unless he or she knows and understands the context out of which those words come.

John Shelby Spong

 

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