The Easter Moment by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Author:Bishop John Shelby Spong [Spong, Bishop John Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-204796-0
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Published: 1980-07-15T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Delving beneath Scripture

The deeper we go into the exploration of any truth, the more we discover the inadequacy of language. Language points us toward a reality that it cannot capture. Part of the great knowledge explosion in the world of science in this century is still not embraced by the language we use. So long as our minds are shackled by that language we will not be able to imagine the fullness of that truth. We still talk about the sun’s setting or the four corners of the earth or up in the sky, though the world view that created that language has been dead for 500 years. It is inevitable that our world view shapes our language and our language informs our world view. This means that language that is literalized will always distort that which it seeks to describe. Truth, no matter how true, will be falsified as soon as it is described, understood, or captured by the words and mind set of any person or generation.

This is true even in the realm of history. Objective events obviously occur, but the moment they are described, they are no longer objective. They becomerather a subjective interpretation of an objective event. There is no such thing as objective history. A marvelous book title I came across in my days of living in the South announced that the contents of the volume were An Objective History of the Civil War from the South’s Point of View. The dominant understandings of history are always written by those who win the wars and have the power to install their points of view into the orthodox position. One can, for example, read an American version of the Mexican-American War and then read a Mexican version and wonder whether it is the same war that both accounts are describing.

It is deeply important that we understand and appreciate the relativity, the inevitable mythology, the subjectivity of all language before we begin to explore the specific language that seeks to describe the Moment that gave rise to Christianity. For, I reiterate, I am convinced that there is a literalness about the truth of Easter, even though I am also convinced that the words that seek to proclaim or relay that truth cannot and should not themselves be literalized.

We have examined in some detail the conflicting testimony in the Gospel narratives in regard to the way each Gospel writer seems to understand the Easter Moment. At the very least, an open and honest facing of the irreconcilable conflict in the details of these narratives should make us ask those whose need for religious security seems to demand a biblical literalism to tell us, please, which version they want to be literal about. Conflicting accounts simply cannot be literalized without unacceptable mental gymnastics or partial blindness. But now that we have cracked open a view of the truth beyond literalism and begun to explorethat vast terrain, I would like to invite the reader even deeper into the resurrection narrative.

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