A New Christianity

Section Internet Links	Larry's Devotional	Wayne's Notes	Jock's Notes
Devotional - Larry J. Fisk WHOA-HOE-HOE! [...acknowledging the tumultuous noise outside and around us] BRZCRBLSNVLRTUDAMNBDGRESH ! [...imitating the raucus stage whispers enveloping us] CRASH! Listening to all the sounds around me. B A N G !-- In comic book capital letters! Buzz, rush, bzzzzz, is that tinnitus I hear or just the constant rush of my life, their lives, our lives? How do you get from noise, busy, scurry, buzz: "what are they saying?" "What are they thinking". "What do I feel?" " What does she feel?" "What do they know?" " How do we get from this tenseness, this anticipation, these endless concerns, this L O U D N O I S E to something akin to peace, silence - and do it all in six or seven minutes?" :>) "Blow a whistle maybe!" "Rap everyone on the shoulder with a birch stick?" Maybe there was something to Zen masters and their simple swats on the shoulder. "Invite everyone to silence." "Invite everyone here to close their eyes. Notice the noise? Notice the bustle, the rustle, noises outside this room? Movements inside this room? Discomfort? Comfort? Breathing? What can we accomplish in a few moments? Why should I worry?" Now inside, inside my head. The same whoa, crash, bang but not quite in comic book uppercase letters. Its noisy in here as well. Good God do I ever stop. "What are they thinking"? "What am I thinking? What am I feeling? Am I afraid? Am I excited. How will it go tonight? Will I get a chance to speak? Should I speak. Why am I afraid to ask a question or make a comment? They seem to know so much? I'll make a fool of myself? What if I say something and no one comments-what does that mean?" B i s h o p ..... J o h n ...... S h e l b y ...... S p o n g - I don't agree. How does he think this way? Why? God Bless, if there is a God who blesses, God bless John Spong - finally someone says it the way I've been thinking and feeling- for how long? All my life? When I do disagree with Jock or Wayne-will I let it be known, others do, but how will I do it. Do they get hurt when we disagree? Hey, I love it when THEY disagree-what a great learning experience when they don't see eye to eye, when they interrupt each other because they see things quite differ..ent..l..y - hmmm ....God look at the patter-patter-patter - think , think, thoughts, thoughts. That lonely woman in hospital preparing for surgery-will Tom be okay after his colon operation? Do they know the hurt I feel, the pain in my.... ..... ...... ..... Its quieter now! .... ....... Are we afraid of the silence? Is this what death is like? I'm still thinking, still asking questions. Maranatha - Lord be with us! Just s l o w l y n o w ---- Mar a na tha - Mar a na tha. Breathe in slowly - from the diaphragm counting to four - hold the breath for a four count - breath out slowly through the nose, another count to four - then repeat -in from the diaphragm - one - two - three - four, HOLD two three four - OUT two three four. Mar - a - na - tha There are as many atoms in one medium grain of sand as there are grains of sand in all the beaches around the earth. One tiny proton - what is it? A billionth of an atom in measurement of a space? Five hundred billion of them in the dot of this i ? Somehow that single proton comes together with an ounce of matter in weight squeezed in so that it explodes- in a time so short it is that part of a second which fills the 000,000,000,000,000s across a page-and then broadens, widens - within a fraction of a second it is immeasurable. CREATION - A UNIVERSE, but still expanding, never completed! Where did it come from? What was there before-nothing! But I can't even perceive of nothing! What if there were no universe, no big bang, no exploding little proton?-but there is! How can one NOT believe in God. Is this why Spong wants us to move beyond Theism?--- Just so that we can take in the mystery and vastness of this Creator? All that pain, all that rattle - now I think, I reflect, I feel from somewhere a bit different. I A M A L I V E! I am alive! I am not dead! I may be uncertain, I may be restless, I may be uncomfortable, I may be in pain - but I A M A L I V E. And God answered "Tell them 'I AM' has sent you". God is life, God is not out there - because out there is the nothingness that the universe expands to fill up. HE/SHE/IT is not beyond the universe because there is no beyond the universe. God is-where? There is no "where". God just I S. Ruach - breath - wind - God is the breathing, the wind, the nothingness behind all that exists. God is in life, God IS life, God is the I A M - God is existence, God IS being. Love wastefully! I remember now. Where did I do it? How do I know it? Wasteful love, lavished love on anyone. Just do it, just love extravagantly. I don't know if I can do that anymore, or if I ever did. .... .... But now there is something just a bit- what?- deeper?, quieter? - sort of inspiring? - sort of? - not Jesus, but sort of like that same spirit. So God is the nothingness, God is in those expanding stars, God is even in the emptiness to which the universe travels. But if there is nothing there, maybe it isn't TRAVELLING so much as it is creating-becoming as it expands. God is creating. CREATING - CREATING NOW - THAT is God. .... .... .... and so with love? LOVE is God. COMPASSION - can I be compassionate? Rilke-we ask the questions and then almost unnoticed we BECOME the answers - YES! - that's it! - we can BECOME compassion!. We can become like God, part of God, we are that universe-in-creation. It isn't over, it's on-going, we are ALIVE, we are BECOMING, we are alive and becoming COMPASSION. Thanks John, thanks Jock, thanks Wayne, thanks for the questions everyone. ..... I feel the silence, I feel the calmness, I feel the gratitude, I feel the-the TEARS of J O Y. .... .... Now gently back to the room, to my friends, to all these wonderful friends, for we are all friends, (fellow passengers on the backs of the universe with our illnesses and weaknesses now seen as baggage that we all lug along in different shapes and sizes-now with some much larger, a bit deeper perspective-back to our study, on with our questioning back to the noise-but it has a little larger space now -- until the next time. T h a n k Y o u !
Jock's. Ch 5 - The Original Christ: Before the Theistic Distortion For one reason or another we all have questioned the roots of our faith. It is an unsettling experience. We become attuned to being adrift and fear what Spong calls a theological domino effect. If we acknowledge the demise of theism, will we not then see all our religious icons tumble? He reminds us that from the start, it was not about the death of God, but rather a shedding of old images. We can become participants in a "worldwide spiritual awakening" if only we are open to radical change. We should not be content to exist on the edge of secular society as an irrelevant and marginalized church, but rather to seek out our fuller purpose in today's society. To accomplish this he says we both CAN and MUST learn to tell the Christ Story in a way apart from theism. We must because the "residual theism of the past is today strangling the very life out of Christianity." When this process has happened in recent centuries, the Christ that comes forward is the portrait of a great teacher. But this is weak tea indeed. Little of Jesus' teaching was original. Spong quotes Joachim Jeremias, a new testament scholar, as saying Jesus was unique in calling God "Abba - beloved parent". This has been translated as father to us. But "father" has been used as a name of God since the Summerians, and certainly in the Hebrew Bible. But Jesus special meaning didn't survive. Check HERE for a link to a dissertation on the Lord's Prayer by Jeremias. It is astonishing. It is beautiful. It is precisely the sort of reason we should look again at our Christ-Story as Spong suggests. In doing so we see what wonderful light scholarship shines on our traditions. Robert Funk is the founder of the Jesus Seminar of which Spong is a fellow. Yet Spong says critically that "the Jesus who remains when Funk has completed his task looks to me not like a demoted Jesus but a court-martialled Jesus, a destroyed Jesus: (83) And so he addresses the deconstruction of Jesus' deification. He points out that to the first Christians and most since, there is something about Jesus that is more than just human - and that in some way the human and the divine seem a part of who Jesus is. It is of course the theistic part of that tradition that Spong agrees with Funk is gone. Then Spong suggests what appears to many to be a strange idea. Let's try to understand how Jesus came to be considered divine by distinguishing the chronological order of the New Testament. When many hear the proposition that the theistic god is dead, they tend to think that the whole tradition is being thrown away, and a serious consideration of the most ancient parts of the bible is unexpected. But exactly so do most modern scholars go. It is from the results of such studies, such correlations, that tradition is both deconstructed and also reconstructed. Spong reviews the Qeulle or Source "Q" document idea first. The deduction from considering the common parts as being older is that it reveals the earliest way Jesus followers understood him. This possibly might be as early as 20 years after his death. Similarly the Gospel of Thomas casts early light on Jesus. Consider that certain parts of the Jesus story are not told in these oldest documents: no miracles, no supernatural birth or death, no parables, and no theological language describing him. There is then the suggestion in these oldest writings, that the theistic overtones to Jesus came later - at least it is agreed they were not written down until much later. Jesus is portrayed as a teacher worth remembering. Then a short study of the writings of Paul is given, because of course they predate the gospels. Many people do not know this because the gospels are ahead of the letters in the order of the canon. Paul writes only 20-30 years after Jesus death. And in these most early and important works, Jesus is not described as having had a miraculous birth, there are no miracle stories. Resurrection was not only real for Paul but the essential meaning of the new faith. God is clearly seen in Jesus Christ. However there are differences to later claims, and the fuller god language had not been developed yet. Continuing on into Mark, we find many miracle stories, and yet there is neither a miraculous birth story and Mark ends with an empty tomb. In Mark, Spong sleuths out an arrangement of the life of Jesus into the calendar of Jewish synagogue worship. This is mishrash. There are 6 references to this in the material in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Versions study. Click HERE. The purpose of Mark then Spong suggests might well have been to tell the Jesus-story in such a way that it could be read at Sabbath services. i.e. Mark is not biography but liturgy. "By extricating Jesus from the dying concepts fo theism, we might be able to make that same claim in our day with renewed and authentic power." (96)
Wayne. Ch 6 - Watching Theism Capture Christianity Opening Comments on the Contemporary Relevance of Critical Theology Today in the Globe and Mail, there is an article on Canon Gene Robinson, the homosexual man in a committed relationship that is scheduled to become the bishop of the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire on Sunday. Those who follow these matters in the news may know that Robinson's candidacy was approved by the Episcopal Church USA, in convention this summer. The upshot of this approval, plus the decision of the Anglican diocese of New Westminster BC earlier this year, has been a very difficult and challenging international crisis in the World Anglican Communion. .. Canon Robinson, 56, said the Anglican tradition has never relied on a literal reading of the Bible for moral guidance, suggesting those that do have a somewhat immature approach to Christianity. "The Anglican church has always taken those words seriously but not literally. And we have always used our good scholarship, our thinking and the tradition of the church to help us understand scripture." Click HERE for full article in Globe and Mail. Scripture, tradition, reason and personal experience are all important characteristics in the discernment of the Spirit for issues that need addressing by the people of God. Therefore, what we are dealing with when we discuss Spong and his assessment of how theism captured Christianity, or other matters pertaining to the interpretation of scripture and the tradition of the church, is not some esoteric or impractical matter. It strikes at the heart of what it means to be Christian today. Universal and common understandings about God and of how God wants us to live have varied, even from the very early days of the early church. Quite apparently, God speaks differently to different people, in different places, in different times. What are the things about faith that are timeless and unchanging, and what are variable? That is a good question. John and Thomas To go further into the issue of how Christian understandings of God and of human behaviour reflected a diversity of views and understandings of the truth, even from the beginning, let me quote again a paragraph from JockOs presentation: Spong reviews the Quelle or Source "Q" document idea first. The deduction from considering the common parts as being older is that it reveals the earliest way Jesus followers understood him. This possibly might be as early as 20 years after his death. Similarly the Gospel of Thomas casts early light on Jesus. Consider that certain parts of the Jesus story are not told in these oldest documents: no miracles, no supernatural birth or death, no parables, and no theological language describing him. There is then the suggestion in these oldest writings, that the theistic overtones to Jesus came later - at least it is agreed they were not written down until much later. There are some interesting and parallel themes in the new book on Thomas and John by Elaine Pagels: Beyond Belief - The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2003). Thomas was near the beginning and John near the end of the gospel writing. Pagels says there was a progression of church development and for matters of theology and of power, these two camps ended in conflict. The Gospel of John won the day and is in the New Testament we know. The Gospel of Thomas lost this battle and until recently was also lost from human memory. We are inclined to believe that all decisions regarding the canon (or authorized contents) of scripture and the earliest creeds were watertight expressions of the Spirit of God at work, and that no error, no human intervention or abuse, could have been made in the process of determining what is orthodox Christianity. The fact is, from the very beginning, the church has had to deal with less than perfect understandings of God. What we have inherited as theism, or the truth about God, is quite conceivably a good guess, but not perfection. That is simply because human beings have been part of it and human beings make mistakes. Spong deals with matters pertaining to who Christ thought he was in chapter five. Chapter six deals primarily with what the Gospel writers and the early church thought he was. Gradually, we are told, the original ideas of Jesus and his self-understanding were reshaped, so that, to repeat the phrase Spong uses "theism captures Christianity." The Varied Gospel Story of Jesus Spong proceeds with a kind of Gospel comparison or interpretation of the theistic Jesus. "Q", Mark, and Thomas (we have already been told) are not the sources, or expressions of worship for a theistic Jesus that we read about in Matthew. The Jesus depicted in Matthew's narrative, he says, is no longer the same as when Jesus himself walked this earth... (It) was a portrayal of Jesus which indicated that he was at his birth not really human but the incarnation of a theistic deity (98). It is quite obvious, that Matthew ... heightens the sense of the miraculous power of Jesus as he develops his story (100). The fact that, in Matthew 28:9, women followers of Jesus grasp his feet after his apparent return to life after the crucifiction, represents the first instance in New Testament where Jesus resurrection was interpreted as happening to a physically resuscitated, formerly dead body (102). This supernatural interpretation of the resurrection of Jesus - that new life for Christians is based on an actual physical resurrection from the dead - was very late coming into the Christian tradition. But it had its roots in some of the Gospel traditions, such as Matthew. Spong believes this was an interpretive overlay, not the original facts, about what actually happened to Jesus when wonderful things occurred in the new Christian community after Jesus had been crucified and was thought to be dead. Supernatural power incarnate, as the way to interpret the presence of God in the person of Jesus, was clearly not an original part of the Jesus-story (102). Spong believes it was added to the story, and is not what Jesus himself thought. Luke 2 narrates an account of the virginal conception of Jesus, and heightens the physicality of the risen body of Jesus very dramatically (104-5) John the evangelist, Spong says, takes the theistic interpretation of Jesus to another level. The identity forged between Jesus and God is asserted over and over, as in the passage "the Father and I are one" (10:30). Jesus is also portrayed as possessing such a physically resuscitated body that he can offer the nail prints in his hands and the spear wound in his side for Thomas (the doubter) to touch (20:27). Note that John here portrays Thomas as less a believer than he or the other disciples - an apparent case of one-upmanship in the battle for canonical rights that John ultimately won, and Thomas lost. As the Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian (ecumenical) creeds were formulated over the next several centuries of Christian history, incarnation was defined, Jesus became the God-Man -- perfect in divinity, perfect in humanity. But, says Spong, how could a human being have the Holy Spirit as his father and still be fully human? Doctrine expanded into dogma. These questions were simply ignored. Theism was triumphant. Jesus of Nazareth was clothed with the armour of theism (111). This gave Jesus the power, most of which he did not claim for himself, to be God in human form, establish the church, dictate the scriptures to demonstrate his divinity, etc. As the church needed new truths to counter rational thinking, Spong says, it formulated new dogma that did not require rational thinking but must be taken by faith. Thus, the Roman Catholic Church could declare even the virgin Mary both immaculately conceived and a permanent virgin (1870) and one who did not die, but who ascended bodily into heaven (1950). All this was done to defend the sinlessness of Jesus, a major characteristic of him being a divinity in his own right. How many more defenses must be erected to keep theism intact? One wonders, Spong says, how long it will be before the whole system shatters (112). Can Christianity then continue to live as theistically understood? "I do not think so," says Spong. Questions to Think About 1. Do you believe that Jesus may actually have had a different understanding of himself than those who became his disciples and founders of the church? 2. What do you make of the idea, posed by people like Pagels as well as Spong, that the founders of the church and the New Testament writers may, in fact, have been much more divided, politically and theologically than we might have thought. 3. How important is it to you that Jesus is understood as the Son of God in the classic Christian understanding of the term? Give reasons.
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