A New Christianity, a New Prayer Bishop Spong Style

Column by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox on 24 November 2016 7 Comments

“My goal in life is to pray without ceasing”.
Bishop John Shelby Spong

In his book A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How A New Faith is Being Born, Bishop Spong addresses multiple issues worthy of further consideration especially because the coming year 2017, marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and Spong is rightly calling for a Reformation today.(1) I suppose it is worth mentioning that I have been doing the same as in my book A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity which contains the 95 theses that I pounded at Luther’s church in Wittenberg at Pentecost season in 2006 in response to Cardinal Ratzinger making himself pope, a practice I repeated five years later at Cardinal Law’s Basilica of Maria Maggiore in Rome on a Sunday morning in protest of his cover-up for pedophile clergy in his previous assignment as archbishop of Boston.

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Question

If the Virgin Birth is not true, then how could Christ, in his completely human conceived state, accomplish salvation for mankind?

Answer

Dear David,

Your question assumes that it was the Virgin Birth, which made Christ divine. I think it was the experience people had of meeting God in Jesus that created the narratives of the Virgin Birth. That tradition represents a primitive first century attempt to answer the question how it was that God got into Jesus so that people could have a God experience with Jesus. It is interesting to me that only Matthew and Luke resort to this explanation. Paul says only that Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law." Mark says that God entered him at the time of the baptism when the heavens opened and the Spirit descended. John says he was the pre-existent Word or Logos, and described him in the Johanine text on two occasions as "the son of Joseph."

It is fascinating to me to note that the portraits of the most divine Christ in the New Testament are drawn by Paul, who appears never to have heard of the miraculous tradition of Jesus birth and by John who dismissed the virgin birth tradition in favor of the pre-existent Jesus.

The deeper question you need to raise is who is God that we experienced the divine presence in Jesus? But that would take longer than a Q & A column will allow. I do cover that in great detail in my book, Born of A Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Place of Women in a Male Dominated Church.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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