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Title: Jesus for the Non-Religious
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Manufacturer: HarperOne
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| Jesus for the Non-Religious by HarperOne Jesus for the non-religous | | One of Spong's best books. Great analysis his life's meaning and teachings and very rational explanations of ancient miracles. | | Jesus for the Non-Religious by HarperOne A Deconstructed Jesus | Following up on his previous book "A New Christianity for a New World," John Shelby Spong puts together the pieces of his 20+ year quest for Jesus.
This book is largely about deconstructing the myths around the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Spong challenges such ideas as the virgin birth, miracle accounts, and resurrection stories. He then relates such ideas to themes in 1st century Jewish culture. Such as Jesus being simultaneously the Passover lamb and the Yom Kippur Scapegoat.
Spong makes no bones about saying that most of the gospels are contrived and based upon earlier stories. He doesn't say that the images from the bible were the only way the Jews of Jesus' day could wrap their heads around his ministry as some other authors have (I'm thinking of N.T. Wright)
After these first two sections of deconstruction and comparison Spong offers a cursory summary of what he thinks Jesus' life was all about. He uses his usual sermon of living fully, loving wastefully, and being all that one can be courageously, which to me seems like a well worn shoe--for those that are comfortable in old shoes it works, for those that get blisters from the same old thing it might be a bit of a yawn to hear Rev. Spong sum up the entire message of the gospels in three catchy phrases.
The book is worth reading if you want to deconstruct the myths centered around Jesus of Nazareth but if you want to put something in its place you're pretty much on your own because Spong really doesn't address that. | | Jesus for the Non-Religious by HarperOne Jesus for the Non-Religious | | While any fan of Spong is familiar with his theology and worldview, many new readers might be dismayed or even shocked at his explanation of the scriptures found in the Christian Bible. Despair not, good folks, for Spong does provide a real world and postmodern corrrective for an outdated and often cruel and un-christian interpretation of the faith. This book attempts to put the faith into an honest context of postmodern understanding and takes advantage of the past 200 years of biblical research and scholarship. I highly recommend it for the curious and brave, but not so much for the closeminded or already convinced by literal understandings of ancient scriptures. | | Jesus for the Non-Religious by HarperOne Jesus for the Non Religious | | I was expecting more, having read most of Spong's earlier books. It seemed quite repetitious of his earlier works, or at least much of the book seemed like such a review. I was looking for something new, like perhaps a way we might connect with people on a transcendental platform rather than more rehash about the foibles of the Bible, which many seem to accept. | | Jesus for the Non-Religious by HarperOne An atheist bishop? | I appreciate Spong's efforts to come to terms with Christianity. There is quite a bit of real value to this book. But I think perhaps he would be more honest to come out as an "atheist bishop" rather than hold onto a slender thread of Christian belief.
Spong even questions that most cherished element of Christianity, "spiritual rebirth": "Churches want their people to be `born again'--that is, returned to the status of a helpless newborn baby--when what people really need is to be helped to grow up ..." (p. 56).
The midsection of the book offers fascinating insights into how the story of Jesus might have been shaped by Jewish scripture and liturgy. But the sections before and after it are overly negative. His view of Jesus is focused on what Jesus rejected rather than what he believed. Jesus is entirely the one who breaks down barriers: that's fine as far as it goes, but what did Jesus actually believe and do? I think Spong might be more honest if he just said, "modern scholarship has convinced me there is no God." There's nothing inconsistent between that and the reverent and generally careful way Spong studies the scriptures.
At times, though, his reading of scripture is pretty selective. For example, he says Paul knew nothing of Jesus as a miracle-worker. A recurrent error in Spong's scholarship is to conclude that non-mention of something shows no awareness of it. In his resurrection book, he concludes that Paul knew nothing of the empty tomb based on the same reasoning. In one of his undoubted works, Galatians, Paul says, "Does God give you the Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the Law?" (3.5). So while he may not mention Jesus' miracles, he certainly thought Christianity had a strong miraculous element. Non-mention of those things in his accounts of Jesus shows only that he didn't think he needed to elaborate on them there.
The perfect example of where Spong's analysis falls short is the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30). In this story, it is really Jesus who is the upholder of divisions and prejudices, and the woman who breaks through them. And she does so for a reason which is inconvenient for Spong's analysis: he appears to have the power to heal her daughter.
Even Josephus, who I don't think was a believer, may have referred to Jesus as a wonder-worker. L. Michael White has shown that the description of Jesus in his Antiquities may originally have been a kind of disparaging comment: "a performer of paradoxical feats, a teacher of people who accept the unusual with pleasure." It was later Christian copyists, he suggests, who changed "the unusual" to "the truth" and added the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.
Having said those things, I don't claim to understand Jesus any better than Spong. And I consider him a kind of companion in the effort to understand Christianity. There is quite a bit that is helpful in this book, particularly in that middle section.
| | Jesus for the Non-Religious by HarperOne Product Description | Writing from his prison cell in Nazi Germany in 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian, sketched a vision of what he called "religionless Christianity." In this book, John Shelby Spong puts flesh onto the bare bones of Bonhoeffer's radical thought. The result is a strikingly new and different portrait of Jesus of Nazareth—a Jesus for the non-religious. Spong challenges much of the traditional understanding that has for so long surrounded the Jesus of history, from the tale of his miraculous birth to a virgin, to the account of his cosmic ascension into the sky at the end of his life. Spong questions the historicity of the ideas that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, that he had twelve disciples, and that the miracle stories were meant to be descriptions of supernatural events. He also speaks directly to those contemporary critics of Christianity who call God a "delusion" and who write letters to a "Christian nation" and describe how Christianity has become evil and destructive. Spong invites his readers to look at Jesus through the lens of both the Jewish scriptures and the liturgical life of the first-century synagogue. Dismissing the dispute about Jesus' nature that consumed the church's leadership for the first 500 years of Christian history as irrelevant, Spong proposes a new way of understanding the divinity of Christ: as the ultimate dimension of a fulfilled humanity. Traditional Christians who still cling to dated concepts of the past will not be comfortable with this book; however, skeptics of the twenty-first century will not be quite so certain that dismissing Jesus is the correct pathway to walk. Jesus for the Non-Religious may be the book that finally brings the pious and the secular into a meaningful dialogue, opening the door to a living Christianity in the post-Christian world. |
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