Anglican Church of Canada FINALLY Removes Prayer Calling For The Conversion Of The Jews

Former Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong on anti-Semitism:

Quote:

I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John’s gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church. Then I discovered Aileen Guilding’s book, The Fourth Gospel and Jewish Worship, and she convinced me that the fourth gospel was a thoroughly Jewish document. It’s the only one of the four gospels, for example, that mentions all of the major festivals of the Jewish faith. So I spent the next five years reading the Gospel of John and every commentary on the fourth gospel from the first through the early 21st century. I discovered a fascinating gospel that is Jewish to its core, characterized by its boundless, mystical thought.

I can try and track down more from Spong on this topic if people are interested.

For the overwhelming majority of Christians, their theology dictates that anyone who doesn't share their religion is in for eternal torture. Not trying to convert a group, then, in their minds, is like withholding a vaccine for a deadly disease. Sincere believers consider that a hateful act. Christianity's tried to publicly make peace with Judaism since the Holocaust, but aside from the Unitarian Universalists, I don't think I've ever met a practicing Christian who believes Jews aren't going to hell, just like they believe I am.

Don't trinitarians consider Unitarians non-Christian?

The proper term would be the Tanach, right?

Oddly enough I have always heard of it referred to as the Old Testament both at University and at Church, though truthfully I have not set foot ina church for many many years

Oddly enough I have always heard of it referred to as the Old Testament both at University and at Church, though truthfully I have not set foot ina church for many many years

Candace Chellew-Hodge: You say in this book that reading the Bible literally is a Gentile heresy. What does that mean?

John Shelby Spong: It means that the gospels, and especially Matthew [is written by] a Jewish disciple of Jesus, part of a congregation of Jewish disciples of Jesus. [Matthew] assumes certain things that Jews can assume about their common life, their common heritage and scriptures and their common ability to tell stories. He doesn’t have to explain that. Then, by the year 150 or thereabouts, there were so few Jews left in the Christian church that Marcion wanted to remove any semblance of Judaism from the Christian scripture. The church officially resisted that, but unofficially they became quite anti-Semitic. What happens then, you have an audience of only Gentiles reading these Jewish stories and because they don’t understand the storytelling background they have to assume that the stories are literal.

The literalization of the Gospels is not the result of the authors, it’s the result of a generation 150 years after the birth of Jesus who didn’t know the Jewish tradition so they couldn’t see these connections. They didn’t know, for example, that the feeding of the 5,000 was not a miracle. It was a retelling of Moses’ manna in the wilderness story heightened and applied to Jesus. That’s a very different perspective so the Jews never argued about whether Jesus actually fed all those people with five loaves and two fish. But, if you see it as a familiar story in the Jewish tradition where the food supply is expanded in the Moses story, and in the stories of Elijah and Elisha, then you can retell it about Jesus and magnify it.

In addition, Jesus’ ascension into heaven is not an astronomical wonder, it’s the story of Elijah magnified and retold about Jesus. When Elijah ascends into heaven he sends a double portion of his human spirit onto his human disciple. When Jesus ascends into heaven he sends the infinite power of God’s holy spirit on the whole gathered community sufficient to last through all of time.

You’ve got to see the connections between these stories before they make sense. It gives you an alternative to biblical fundamentalism. That’s not original to the text. We imposed fundamentalism on the Bible. No one who has ever read the Bible could be a literalist.

When you’ve grown up in a tradition of literal biblical interpretation, like I did in the Southern Baptist church, your words can be very challenging. You debunk deeply held literal beliefs by asserting that the star of Bethlehem wasn’t real, the Lord’s prayer is a creation of the church and was never uttered by Jesus. If all of these symbols that we have taken literally can’t be read that way, how do we make new meaning?

That’s the hard part. The reason why is that you now have to talk about the Jesus experience in the light of whatever contemporary knowledge we have. We can’t just pretend it’s not there. So, I say to people, “Do you know what a star is? It’s burning masses of gas at incredible temperatures and formed out of all sorts of dust and matter over millions of years. A star does not give a message about some event that happened on earth.”

When you say that, they say, “Well, of course not.” Then you ask, “How many of you have known about a star that traveled across the sky so slowly that wise men could keep up with it? Was it equipped with a GPS system? But then it failed because it led them to Herod, to the palace of the king. It didn’t lead them to the child.”

Once you say that, they say, “I never thought about that.”

They can [then] say that if it’s not true then their whole religious faith is not true, or they can say, “This story was a first-century way that Jews learned to describe something that was incredibly true to them and I need to get out from under their explanation to understand what the substance was,” and that’s the place where you begin to lead them into a new possibility.

Spong explained that followers of Jesus created friction with the first-century Jewish hierarchy. But Christ’s followers “were not Christians at that point, they were Jews who saw in Jesus the next stage of Jewish development.”

As the number of Christ followers grew and the balance of power began to shift, leaders in the orthodox Jewish party “became more and more rigid, because they were threatened with extinction. I think that’s what people do when they are threatened,” Spong said. “They become more and more rigid and more fundamentalist. They cling more and more firmly to less and less reality.”

Leaders of the Jewish party “excommunicated the followers of Jesus, who were Jewish, and then the followers of Jesus began to say things about the orthodox party that sounded very anti-Semitic,” he said.

Once he saw that it was “a Jewish internecine war” going on, he said, it changed his understanding of the anti-Semitism apparent in John’s Gospel.

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“It was not incarnation, that’s a fourth century idea,” Spong said. “It was the identification of the human with the divine in the first century that caused him to say, ‘I am the vine, you are the branches,’ ‘as God dwells in me so I will dwell in you,’ ‘If you’ve seen me you’ve seen the father,’ those sorts of things that, when you read them through fourth century Nicaean theology they sound really strange to me. But when you read them through Jewish mysticism, they sound sort of ecstatic, entering into a new level of consciousness. And so it became very, very important to me as I sort of broke that boundary and entered into a new direction.”

It has been quoted in witch hunts, in heresy trials, in anti-semitic rampages. This is likely to surprise many of our readers, so let’s explain why this book has such seemingly angry language slamming the actions of “the Jews,” which becomes a shorthand reference for Jesus’s enemies. If we properly understand the first century, though, we know that Jesus and his followers all were Jewish. Your book puts the whole Gospel of John in much deeper context. Give us a brief explanation of all the seemingly anti-Jewish language in John.

JACK: Yes, John is overtly quoted in anti-Semitic literature because of these references to “the Jews.” But we have to remember that this was written as the Jewish people were suffering through an era of war with Rome. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. There was conflict between Jewish groups about who controlled the synagogue—about their future. Eventually, the followers of Jesus, who were primarily Jewish, were excommunicated from the synagogue. So this revisionist party who followed Jesus referred to the Jews still within the synagogue as “the Jews.” It is confusing to readers today, but what actually was happening was: Jews were arguing with Jews in a very turbulent era.

What we are reading about, in those references, was an internal Jewish debate. If you go back and recover the history of the early church in this era, you’re seeing Christians emerge from within Judaism and trying to separate themselves from other Jews. Today, people might experience this kind of conflict in a church where there may be a liberal group and a Fundamentalist group vying for the future of the church.

Through the centuries, John also was widely quoted as the standard for what came to be known as orthodox Christianity. The Christian creeds were based largely on John and, along with the creeds, came things like the heresy hunts and the inquisition. It was as though this one gospel gave the world the final rules for our faith.

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JACK: People will never understand the true message of John’s gospel until we stop regarding it as literal history. In fact, John keeps telling readers not to be too literal.

Early in John, we read about Jesus himself making fun of people who take things too literally. We read the story of Nicodemus. Jesus is saying that people must be born again, but Nicodemus is a literalist. He asks Jesus: “How can I climb back up into the womb again?” Jesus makes fun of him. Jesus says: You’re supposed to be a teacher, yet you don’t understand what I’m saying? I’m talking about a new birth.

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DAVID: We are talking, here, about entire sections of your book that take many pages to explain to readers. So, I’m sure readers of this interview are likely to have many more questions about Mary within the Gospel of John. We can say: Read the book. Then, let’s touch briefly on one more example: the grape vine and vineyard imagery in John.

JACK: This vine image is a very Jewish image. You’ll find a lot of places in the Hebrew scriptures and the Prophets in which Israel is referred to as God’s vineyard. And, as he makes so many references to this imagery, Jesus is trying to talk about where we experience God. He’s saying God is not—out there. Of course, most modern people realize that God is not a deity sitting on a throne up above the dome of the sky. We haven’t believed that since the modern scientists have begun charting the cosmos for us. We now know that there isn’t a dome over us. The universe is vast. Light travels for millions of years across the universe. So the notion of God sitting up on a throne above the dome of the sky—an ancient image of a deity—doesn’t make much sense to people.

But if you see God as a permeating presence—and I think John does that over and over again—then this vine imagery takes on new meaning. Jesus is saying that, if we stay attached to the God presence, then we become bearers of God. We are the branches of the vine. God permeates all that there is. I can say that God was in Christ but I can also say that God is in you, David, and God is in me. What Jesus is calling us to do is to break the old boundaries of humanity. Jesus is calling us to break out of the barriers that separated Jew from gentile, men from women, wealthy from poor. We have to break out of the boundaries that separate Protestant from Catholic, gay from straight, all the boundaries in which we seek to wall off people to this day. This is a different Christian message than the old Christian banner that marched around the world for so many centuries—all about conquering and dominating the whole world in the name of a deity on a throne above the sky.

If you took that thought to its logical extreme, Mary, Joseph and the older Apostles, as well as John the Baptist, would all end up becoming metaphysical crispy critters, since they existed BEFORE Jesus.