Jesus for the Non-Religious

John Shelby Spong, HarperCollins

Jesus for the Non-Religious has three main sections.

The first dismisses the possibility of a truly 21st century mind believing in the miraculous, the supernatural. It argues that the gospels are not historical documents, not eyewitness accounts, but are liturgical documents which have applied Old Testament stories to Jesus as a means of expressing his impact on his followers, depicting the person that they perceived him to be.

The second section explores the various Jewish traditions from which the images used to depict Jesus are drawn: Son of Man, Servant, Shepherd-King, Yom Kippur, and Passover. This section also shows how the narratives of the synoptic gospels are structured to correspond with the Jewish religious year.

The third affirms the fact that Jesus was a real human being, seeks to explain how belief in what Spong calls a "theistic God" arose, and identifies this belief as a major foundation of aggressively prejudiced behaviour.

In this section Spong tries to explain what his faith in God means and to identify the Jesus revealed by the gospels once belief in their historicity is stripped away.

Who is the target audience for this book?

The content of some Bible passages is described in considerable detail, which suggests that Spong hopes that people not very familiar with the Bible will read his work. However, as so much of the book is given to debunking most of the traditional Christian doctrine, it would seem also to be aimed at Christians who might be persuaded to move away, or further away, from conservatism.

I found the book interesting, provocative, annoying and ultimately unsatisfying.

Annoying because I didn't really want to wade through Spong's account of Bible passages I'm familiar with, but did so in case I missed a point he was trying to make.

Annoying, too, because he kept thumping the "not historical" point long after I'd got it very clearly in my mind.

I found it frustrating, too, because section 1 gave me the impression that, after its demolition work was done, the subsequent sections would be constructive and positive, but I spent most of sections 2 and 3 impatiently expecting these positives to appear.

However it was only in the final chapter that I felt I had come to some understanding of the Jesus that Spong sees. Incidentally, this final chapter is wonderfully eloquent - slabs of it could form the basis of a stirring sermon.

My summary of this Jesus he describes is that he is the original and ultimate humanist (yes, okay, the alpha and the omega if you like!).

Spong's idea of the divinity of Jesus is that he was "fully human". This term has been applied to Jesus by many people and I think I understand what it means, but not to the extent of explaining or defining it: A Philosophy 1 student would shoot it to shreds.

Time and again, when the book points out evil acts carried out by people in the name of their sincere Christian faith, I find myself recognising, "But that's not my faith." There is religious belief which is far from Spong's radicalism, but which does not lead to the evils that Spong says flow from our traditional doctrines.

To the limited extent that I could work out who or what is the God that Spong believes in, it seems to be linked in a rather narrow way to humanity. Spong does not seem to recognise a spiritual dimension to the physical world, to nature. I guess he would see the beauty and inspiration of human creativity as spiritual, an aspect of God, but that didn't come through to me in reading the book.

So the main thing I found unsatisfying about the book was that it gives an account of God which is part of my own faith, but is less than my own experience.

There are some details I criticise too. For example, in seeking to show the story of Herod's killing of the babies to get rid of Jesus as a re-run of Pharaoh's killing of the Hebrew baby boys, Spong says Pharaoh's motive was to get rid of Moses.

As I read Exodus 1, this is incorrect. Spong's enthusiasm for his idea of correspondence between the stories has over-ridden accuracy.

In seeking to show that the accounts of the Last Supper are not factual, Spong assumes that because Paul's letters refer to the Last Supper without giving these details, the details were unknown to Paul. This is a glib and unsupported assumption.

While I am comfortable with the possibility that none of the "miracles" in the Bible really happened, I find Spong's insistence that we can't believe in them unsound.

There is an assumption here that modern science is certain of a lot more than is really the case. This ignores developments in modern physics such as The Uncertainty Principle and Chaos, and ideas such as those expounded by Paul Davies in The Cosmic Blueprint.

What I do find convincing is Spong's account of the gospels being structured to certain liturgical purposes, and of the way stories in later gospels have been developed from those in earlier ones, and the relating of so much gospel material to Old Testament material. However it seems to me that this could happen whether or not there is a factual basis to the stories.

I say that what Spong has done is to attempt to show that Christian faith is possible without believing in miracles or in a God who acts to favour the faithful. For me, he has not succeeded in this and, despite his protestations to the contrary, I think he has become an atheist humanist.

However, he has underlined where the emphases need to lie in interpreting the gospels for the first decade of the 21st century and has pointed a direction that some might follow in seeking a faith that can encompass and support contemporary knowledge.

Bruce Hanna

http://insights.uca.org.au/reviews/books/jkl/jesus-for-the-non-religious.htm