Why Christianity Must Change or Die by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Author:Bishop John Shelby Spong [Spong, Bishop John Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

What Think Ye of Christ? Where the Human Enters the Divine

W HAT THINK YE OF CHRIST? Who is Christ for you or for me? Does that first-century life still have some relevance for those of us living today? In what sense, if any, can we call him savior? Is he an example that we might choose to emulate? Is there anything more than that?

Can we, in fact, do what I have proposed? Can we remove from Christ the theistic framework of the past, which portrayed him either as a heavenly deity who had come to earth as a kind of divine visitor or as a human being who somehow possessed the power of a supernatural God? Can we still speak of him in any sense as the “only son” of the heavenly father?

If these things are no longer options for our time, is anything left by which to commend the being of this Jesus, not just his teaching, to our postmodern world? How can we today talk about the meaning of his cross apart from seeing his death as some kind of sacrifice? Is something more than just a human tragedy to be found in the symbol of the cross? Does that cross carry with it any salvific meaning, and if so, what is it? Surely, there must be some way a believer in exile can respond meaningfully to these probing questions.

If there is not, then perhaps we should bow to the inevitable and admit that we are not just in a period of exile, but rather that we have entered the death throes of that venerable religious system we once called Christianity.

Despite my protestations to the contrary, it will surely be suggested by my critics that what I have been doing in my career and in this volume is nothing less than trying to create a new religion—and a humanistic one at that. If that is so, they will suggest that I should be courageous and admit that Christianity, like many other human religious systems, has simply faded away, and that I should resign from the life of the Church. Why, they ask, would I or anyone else engage in this tortuous process of recasting, rethinking, reinterpreting, and revisioning? Those are valid concerns.

I enter this process because I can neither dismiss this Christ nor live comfortably with the way he has been traditionally interpreted. I am not prepared to conclude that the traditional way of interpreting Jesus has exhausted the possibilities. I can with no great difficulty set aside those interpretations, but I cannot set aside the Christ experience, which created the necessity for those theistic interpretations of yesterday. I still find the power of the Christ compelling.

I am moved by the generations of believers whose lives have been enriched, even transformed, by this Jesus. My own experience is that time after time my relationship with Jesus has propelled me beyond limiting barrier after limiting barrier. So I will not let him go until I have explored the meaning of his life with a new intensity.

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