I promised a few remarks about Bishop John Shelby Spong’s class on the Gospel of John based on his new book, The Fourth Gopsel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic (New York: HarperOne, 2013). I was a student in his class on July 14-18 at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA (just across the street from CDSP). I’ll keep these remarks brief. First, let me say I am neither a Spong detractor nor a Spong devotee. What did impress me is that he has continued to think about his understanding of John since the publication of his book in 2013. One would be hard pressed to find a single sentence in my notes that I can find repeated just as it is written in his book. Several things have to be said. Growing up in the pre-Civil Rights South and in the hot bed of American fundamentalism, he has spent a good deal of his life in reading, conversation, and engagement with oppressed groups and has found a way to suggest that the Christian religion as an institution has got it wrong on many counts. If you read his books, you know that he is not a fan on Nicaea (325 AD/CE). Now if you read any respectable historian on Nicaea, you will find the historian talking about the more political implications of Nicaea than its doctrine—one which may be seen now as a leap from what the earliest traditions present. As far back as the 1970s, he was saying that Jesus was a Jew and that understanding Judaism in a deep way was a key to understanding the Christ event. Today, Jewish scholars of the New Testament such as Amy-Jill Levine, and rabbis, particularly from the Reform tradition, speak in Christian churches of the Episcopal variety and others and are filling the reading lists for seminary courses. My point is that in many way, he was pressing issues early that have come to fruition for the entire church. One may quibble with some of his points, but they are worth considering. His work of the gospel of John represents an attempt to understand the mysterious language traditionally understood as the incarnation language of John’s gospel instead in light of merkabah mysticism—a tradition that scholars now see as beginning in late Second Temple Judaism. Scholars have identified it in Paul previously. If you will, this is exactly what Spong said: “Jesus came to expand the human potential so what we can walk into the mystery of God.” John was a Jew, and he understood Jesus in Jewish ways and crafted his story of Jesus around the liturgical calendar within Judaism, connected with the feasts of Judaism. For Spong, many of the characters in John are symbols, based on the notion of Jewish story telling which uses characters in highly symbolic ways. The gospel itself teaches you how to read because literalistic readers—even among Jesus’ disciples—are treated as missing the point through their literal readings of the events. Before reading the book and hearing his lectures, I was not expecting to meet a mystic myself. Over 80 now, perhaps himself preparing to walk into the mystery of God whose door was opened by Jesus in this gospel for him, Spong presented the most serene series of lectures I have ever heard. Friends, as Hamlet says, “the rest is silence.”
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 17:46:46 +0000
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