A Word Whose Time Has Come To An End

[lunamoth]

Originally Posted by Thomas

If Spong denies the Incarnation, then there is nothing of Christ left - 'Christ' becomes some universal abstract... surely?

And what is 'love' if God cannot engage with the world? I know I have only read superficially, but 'love' is not something on its own account - love requires object and subject ... and you can't ask man to love an abstract ... only a very few can manage that ...

... I know I haven't read him, but if you strip away the Incarnation, Revelation, God (as He who communicates something of Himself to man) ... if Scripture and its content is invalid as anything more than a myth of a race history ... then what's left, what defines Christianity?

Thomas

I know Thomas, and I am perplexed and vexed...and intrigued. Yes, as far as I can tell Spong rejects the Incarnation, but he also rejects the interpretation of the Fall that makes the Incarnation necessary.

Christ is universal for Spong, but not abstract. If I understand correctly, Spong does not view divinity and humanity as separate but "rather, they are like two poles of a continuum that appear to be separate and distinct, yet when one travels from one to the other, the discovery is made that their shadows blend into and invade each other. I seek a Christology that preserves divinity but not supernatural theism, which is a distinction not often made. I seek in Jesus a human being who nonetheless makes known, visible, and compelling the Ground of All Being."

There is a chapter in the book I've been referring to called Jesus Beyond Incarnation and I'll bullet a few of his points here:

"To put it bluntly, with theism no longer a concept I can salute, can this Jesus still be a God-experience for me? Can he still be for me a doorway into and an expression of the holy? The answers to these questions will determine, quite frankly, whether what I am seeking is a genuine reformation of Christianity or whether I am deluded and in my suppressed fear attempting to hide from or ot cover up the death of Christianity. The states are thus quite obviously high..."

"What I see is a new portrait of Jesus. He is one who was more deeply and fully alive than anyone else I have ever encountered, whether in my lifetime, in history, or in literature. I see him pointing to something he calls the realm (or kingdom) of God, where new possibilities demand to be considered. I see him portrayed as one who was constantly dismantling the barriers that separate people from one another. I see him inviting his followers to join with him, to walk without fear beyond those security boundaries that always prohibit, block, or deny our access to a deeper humanity. Perhaps above all else he is for me a boundary-breaker who enables me to envision the possibility of my own humanity breaking through my human barriers to reach the divinity that his life reveals, indeed that we Christians claim he possesses."

"I see Jesus as one who is calling those around him to walk past their tribal fears."

"The Bible also portrays Jesus as one who is journeying beyond the barriers of human prejudice."

"The Bibilical protrait drawn of Jesus even calls and empowers his followers to walk beyond our religious differences--differences we have consistently and falsely invested something of the ultimacy of God."

"Jesus understood that the call of every human being is not just to survive but to journey into both the fullness of one's own humanity and into the mystery of God. What most of us do not seem to embrace is that these two journeys are simultaneous, even identical journeys."

"This human Jesus seems to possess his life so totally that he can give it away without fear."

""Life cannot be given away until life has been possessed. Yet when life is given away freely and totally, the one who does the giving is not diminished. Indeed, the giving, as depicted in the portait of Jesus, actually resulted in the explosion of a new and radically different humanity in a world that was still tied to the survival mentality of our evolutionary past."

Yikes, this is getting long. But these statements address the way that, for Spong, Jesus is Life. The bolded part above is a main point: that Jesus really did reveal to us a new way of life: one not in slavery to our evolutionary instincts (animal?) to survival. He goes on with two more sections that tell how Jesus is Love, and Jesus is Being. I'll try to limit the quotes here:

"Love is manifested in the human willingness to venture beyond the boundaries of safety, to risk losing ourselves, and even in the desire to explore the crevices of the unknown."

"If life is holy and if love creates and enhances life, then love is also holy. So I am led to suggest that love and God cannot be separated and that to share love is nothing less than sharing God. For one to abide in love is to abide in God, for one to give love away is to give God away. That is why when one sees a life that loves wastefully, is is said of that person, "God was in that life." That is part of what a nontheistic but still God-centered Jesus means to me."

"What human life needs is not a divine rescue. What we need is rather a life so open, so free, so whole, and so loving that when we experience that life, we are called into the reality of love. We are opened to the source of love and enter the empowering presence of love. Such a life then becomes our doorway into the infinite and inexhaustivle power of love. I call that love God. I see it in Jesus of Nazareth, and I find myself called into a new being, a boundary-free humanity, and made whole in its presence. So God was in Christ, I say. Jesus thus reveals the source of love, and then he calls us to enter it."

I'm not sure if this is how Spong would say it, but God is all about love engaging with/in the world.

luna

[Thomas]

Seems like panentheism to me...

... It also seems to me that if we reject theism then we reject the 'personhood' of the Divine - if there is no 'person' of God, if there is no 'person' of Christ - just a person who became enlightened (and Spong seems closer to Buddhism than Christianity) then the notion of 'person' is limited to the accidental and contingent - and therefore the person cannot enter Union with the Divine - we are then close to an extreme Eckhartian anihilation of individual being (an erroneous readsing of Eckhart) - Union is a joining of two things - Union is not one thing totally subsumed by the other to the point that the one no longer exists ...

The quotes on love etc., I see nothing original, Jesus said most of it Himself, but I do think that his reasoning, as Rowan Williams pointed out, is fundamentally flawed ...

Thomas