Study Guide to John Shelby Spong A New Christianity for a New World.   ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Session 3

 

The following materials were prepared by Keith McPaul for his NCNW study group at Maleny, Queensland:

Robert W. Funk on Jesus and the Kingdom

Affirmation of Faith (United Church of Canada)

Alternative Eucharistic Thanksgiving Prayer (Gary Botha)

Bishop John Shelby Spong on the Creeds and Interfaith Dialogue with Jews

S. Dawes: Extract from a Christmas Sermon

 

Keith has also provided materials prepared for a preliminary session and for sessions 1, 2, 5 and 6.

 

Robert W. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar

From The Once & Future Faith. (Polebridge Press2000)

 

What Jesus Wasn't and the Kingdom of God Isn't.

The distinction between the gospel of Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels permits one to summarise what Jesus wasn't and the kingdom isn't. It is as important to specify what Jesus was not as it is to indicate what he really said and did. In this we are only following the practice of Jesus in frustrating inherited expectations.

1. Jesus did not think a cosmic holocaust would take place in his own time, unlike John the Baptist and many others. He thought God's kingdom was arriving unnoticed.
2. Jesus did not ask his followers to believe that he was the messiah. He certainly never suggested that he was the second person of the trinity. He rarely referred to himself at all, and when he did, he thought of himself only as homeless.
3. Unlike his mentor, John the Baptist, Jesus did not call on his people to repent, or fast, or observe the sabbath. He did not threaten with hell or promise heaven.
4. Jesus did not ask his followers to believe that he was conceived without male sperm or that his mother was a virgin.
5. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem; he was born in Nazareth. The Bethlehem story is a Christian fiction designed to fulfill the prophesy that the messiah would come from the city of David.
6. Jesus did not ask his followers to believe that he would be raised from the dead.
7. Jesus did not suggest that his death would be a blood sacrifice, that he was going to die for the sins of humankind.
8. Jesus did not organise a church, appoint clergy, or advocate celibacy.
9. Jesus did not predict that he would return someday as the son of Adam and sit in judgement on the world.
10. Jesus was not the first Christian, Jesus lived and died a Jew.

 

God's Domain according to Jesus

1. Jesus urges and practices a trust ethic. The kingdom of God, for Jesus is characterised by trust in the order of creation and the essential goodness of neighbour.
2. Jesus urges his followers to celebrate life as though they had just discovered a cache of coins in a field or been invited to a state banquet.
3. For Jesus, God's domain is a realm without social boundaries. In that realm there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, homosexual nor heterosexual, friend or enemy.
4. For Jesus, God's domain has no brokers, no mediators, between human being an divinity.
5. For Jesus, the kingdom permits but does not require cultic rituals to mark the passage from outsider to insider, from sinner to righteous, from child to adult, from client to broker.
6. In the kingdom, forgiveness is reciprocal; individuals can have it only if they sponsor it. The mother of Jesus, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are powerless to rob us of guilt; we must surrender ourselves to the best in us and the needs of neighbour.
7. The kingdom is a journey without end; one arrives only by departing. It is therefore a perpetual odyssey. Exile and exodus are the true conditions of authentic existence.

 

The Language of Faith

In articulating the vision of Jesus, we should take care to express ourselves in the same register as he employed in his parables and aphorisms - paradox, hyperbole, exaggeration, and metaphor. Further, our reconstructions of his vision should be provisional, always subject to modification and correction. We must learn to tell the old stories in new ways appropriate to the time and place.

 

Jesus: A Glimpse

1. Jesus caught a glimpse of the world as it looks when viewed with God's eyes. It was a glimpse of God's domain.
2. Jesus endeavoured to share his vision through his words, his aphorisms, and parables, all of which speak of God's domain only indirectly in figurative language.
3. Jesus celebrated life as though he had just discovered a cache of coins, a lost sheep, or a truant son who had returned home.
4. Jesus was the first stand-up Jewish comic. He indulged freely in exaggeration, caricature, and parody.
5. Jesus advocated and practised an unbroken relationship with God: for him temple and priests were redundant.
6. Jesus subverted kinship codes; "Unless you hate your father and mother etc." True relatives are those who do the will of God.
7. Jesus abrogated the barriers that segregate and divide human beings. He ate openly with prostitutes, tax officials, and other 'sinners' in defiance of purity codes. He advised his followers to love their enemies. Jesus marks the transition from a tribal culture to a trans-ethnic society.
8. Jesus saw Satan fall from the sky, which means that for him the heavens were being cleared of demonic powers.
9. Anxiety about food and drink Jesus considered a lack of trust in God. God, he assured his followers, even counts the hairs on human heads.
10. In the body of authentic lore that originated with Jesus, he asked not one thing for himself and advises his followers to ask for nothing for themselves, except their daily bread.
11. Jesus advocated undermining the system. Concede the suit for cloak and throw in the shirt as a bonus. Turn the other cheek. Go the second mile.
12. The domain of God for Jesus is peopled with outsiders and outcasts. It is not the kingdom of David and Solomon. The kingdom as Jesus envisioned it subverts the common expectations of the restoration of a royal kingdom.
13. Jesus had no doctrine of God; he only had experience of God.
14. Jesus was not merely a victim; he was the victim of his own vision.

 

 

Bishop John Shelby Spong

On the Creeds (from Here I Stand. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999)

An elementary look at the formation of the creeds in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries will reveal that the process that produced them was deeply political and highly compromised. The creeds were more about power than they were about truth. That some came to be called "orthodox"and their versions of Christianity designated "orthodoxy" was not necessarily a recognition of who was right, but a recognition of who had won. A primary purpose of the creeds was not to spell out the Christian faith, but to exclude competing groups and their competing versions of truth from the church's life.

Talking to Jews about Christianity.

I tried to show how the Christ or messiah concept had developed in Jewish history, beginning with its being a title originally given to the king and its later becoming a mythological picture of an idealised future leader who would someday come to inaugurate the Kingdom of God. The Jews, while not admitting incarnational language, were in fact able to point to people whom they believed spoke God,Äôs word or acted out God,Äôs will. So I approached Christology from this point of view. I hoped that they might be able to see the original Christian claim that in Jesus the word of God was spoken and the will of God was being lived out, which then grew into incarnational language. It would for many of them be a doorway into a new way of viewing the Jewish Jesus of Nazareth.

I concluded that answer by asserting that the Gospels do not say in a simplistic way that Jesus is God. Jesus is portrayed as praying to God. He was not talking to himself. Jesus died. It is inconceivable to say that God can die. God did not get crucified. Jesus did. But when the disciples looked at the cross, they saw it as a portrait of the self-giving and ultimate love of God. What the Gospels do say, I went on to explain, was that Jesus revealed God. Jesus pointed to God and enabled people to see God when they looked at Jesus. What God is, they were suggesting, Jesus is. The disciples of Jesus believed that in Jesus the word of God had been spoken and the will of God had been lived out. That is why, I concluded, at Caesarea Philippi it was said of Jesus, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God."

Jesus, our Immanuel

(From a sermon at Christmas, 2001 by Rev Dr S Dawes, Truro, UK)

The Gospels were written backwards. They started with the Easter ending and finishing with the Christmas story. Mark, the earliest Gospel doesn't say a word about Christmas. John, the latest, has the most amazing Christmas introduction. Matthew and Luke fall in between, telling quite different stories but with the same aim; to explain and highlight the significance of Jesus, to say who and what he really is and what he means to them. That's the clue to reading the Christmas stories. Read them as parable stories aiming to explain the tremendous significance of Jesus - of who he was and is and what he meant to the Gospel-writers and can mean to us - the Jesus who is crucified and risen.

All the Gospel writers used the words of the Old Testament prophets to describe what they felt about Jesus. Why were these words preserved?  It wasn' because they predicted the future. It was because they spoke of what God had done or was doing in their own day and age; and if God was the God of yesterday, today and tomorrow, the way he had been seen to act in the past was a sign of how he would act in the future. The words of the prophets were preserved and stories about them handed down so that later generations could find that kind of help and inspiration from them. Later generations could look back and read such words and be encouraged, tell the stories and be given new hope for changing days.

 

 

Send us your suggestions for further supplementary materials!