Charting a New Reformation, Part XXIII - The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 26 May 2016 17 Comments
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Question

My understanding is that if it weren’t for Paul, the Jewish sect of Jesus’ followers would not have survived and become the “church” as we know it.

I’m curious, what do you think that Paul understood as the gospel? The doctrine of atonement was not formulated until Paul was long gone-yet he preached “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ…and him crucified.” Was Paul just stating an historical fact or was there more to it? In either case, what was Paul preaching?

Answer

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your letter. I have some questions about your opening statement. I do not think Paul ever thought of himself as helping “a Jewish sect of Jesus’ followers” to survive. When you read his apologia for Judaism in Romans 9-11, it appears that he saw the struggle between traditional Judaism and the Jewish “followers of the Way, “ who would later become the Christian movement, as a debate about whether or not universalism could arise out of Judaism. I look at his insight in Galatians when in Christ the barriers between Jew and Greek, bond and free, male and female disappear or his hymn to love in I Corinthians where “faith, hope and love abide” he says, “but the greatest of these is love.”

It is not possible in a question and answer format to lay out with any kind of detail or comprehensiveness either of “the theology of Paul,” or even what the message was that Paul was preaching. That would take an entire book or at least a series of ten to twenty columns. What I can do, however, is to pass on to you and to my readers what I regard as the best book on Paul that I have ever read. It is the work of four brilliant scholars from the Jesus Seminar published by Polebridge Press, the publishing house of the Seminar, in 2010 under the title, The Authentic Letters of Paul. The four authors are Arthur J. Dewey, Roy W. Hoover, Lane McGaughy and Daryl S. Schmidt. They also worked from the original Greek text and brought a fresh and challenging translation to the Pauline corpus.

Blessings on your thoughtful ministry.

John Shelby Spong

 

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17 thoughts on “Charting a New Reformation, Part XXIII – The Seventh Thesis, The Resurrection

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