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Sydney Anglican, Mark Thompson, 30 July 2007
(Review of Jesus for the Non-Religious, John Shelby Spong, HarperCollins, 2007)
Jack Spong is back. Once again he is visiting Australia to promote a new book. This one is called Jesus for the Non-Religious and like so many of his others it pulls no punches. Readers will either be excited or outraged as he challenges two thousand years of Christian teaching about Jesus as part of his larger program to free the church of the forms of thought and practice he has found so unhelpful.
Spong is a crusader. He sees himself as a genuine twenty-first century Christian reformer, opening up the way for the survival of Christianity into the third millennium. He rages against the prejudice and violence he believes is inextricably bound up with traditional Christian teaching. Without his program of reform, he insists, the churches are doomed to irrelevance and marginalisation.
Men and women all over the world who think like him (and he names three Australian Archbishops amongst them in his preface) are the only leaders with anything worthwhile to say and it is increasingly urgent that they be heard. Traditional Christian teaching about Jesus, God, the Bible, and humanity can no longer be seriously entertained by ‘any thinking person’. Christianity in the new millennium needs to shed this worn-out mythology and recast itself in a more believable form.
Yet for all its grandiose claims this book, like others from his pen, is really little more than the rehash of long-discarded critical theories and doubts which scholars resolved years ago. It is no surprise that Bishop Spong highlights the contribution of David F. Strauss’ influential Das Leben Jesu, first published in 1835.
Time and again in his own book Spong shows himself ignorant of developments — archaeological, historical, and even theological developments — that have taken place since the long-gone heyday of Protestant liberalism in the nineteenth century. Compounding the book’s problems is the author’s breathtaking self-assurance. While his book masquerades as scholarship, it fails to take seriously anyone with whom he disagrees. Any suggestion of ‘a heaven-sent rescuing saviour’ (p 260) or ‘a supernatural heavenly guardian guiding [the] sacred prophetic texts through the centuries’ (p 113) must be put aside. The Gospels were liturgically crafted documents. Understand this and we can at last get back to the human being, that first century Jew from Nazareth who is still able to capture the imagination and bring us into touch with the divine in each of us.
Spong’s book is hopelessly out of date. Two brief examples must suffice.
In his chapter on the birth of Jesus (chpater 2), he dismisses the miracle of the star as ‘simply not credible’ (p 20). Since it cannot be explained in terms of our more extensive knowledge of cosmology it must not be believed — but are unexplainable miracles really impossible? He rehearses familiar questions about Quirinius’ governship and the nature of the Roman census. However, he totally ignores the micrographic evidence of E. J. Vardaman concerning Quirinius (and the solutions proposed by Godet, Ramsay or Bruce) and the particular nature of a census in the Jewish territories in the first two centuries A.D. (as suggested by Schürer and Braunert). He insists that any suggestion Joseph and his family would have migrated from Bethlehem to Nazareth is improbable (p 17), although he once again fails to mention the impact of a precarious political situation occasioned at first by Herod’s megalomania and then the Roman concern to remove any potential threat to their more direct rule.
Of course the questions he asks are legitimate ones—we have nothing to be afraid of in honest questioning—but he does not even acknowledge that his questions have been asked before and have in fact been repeatedly answered over the past one hundred years with solid appeals to archaeological and historical evidence.
Continue reading at sydney anglican
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