Spong illuminates probable early
Christian psychology. (1) Peter experienced an intolerable contradiction between
Jesus' entirely God-centred, God-affirming life and his God-cursed death by
execution. This was the theological Problem of Evil and the theme of the Book of
Job writ large. Peter must have experienced intensely the problem which
Christian theology sometimes poses very abstractly as a contradiction between
omnipotence and infinite goodness on the one hand and suffering on the other
hand. Peter's solution was, first, to re-interpret the death as expressing
the life, as somehow an ultimate expression of unconditional love, and,
secondly, as far as possible, to deny the death by affirming a Resurrection that
at that stage was spiritual, not physical, and believed to have occurred in
Galilee, not in Jerusalem. Jesus was risen in God, not, as described later,
walking around in Jerusalem. That makes sense of the texts and of Peter's probable
psychological processes.
However, Spong interprets all the accounts
of Jesus' ministry as neither history nor biography but "midrash," meaning
scripturally-based stories written to proclaim a Messiahship that had not yet
been claimed or recognized while Jesus was still alive. Thus, all we know about
Jesus is that he made a big impression on Peter and on some others. For Spong,
this is enough for us now to proclaim Jesus' Messiahship and spiritual
Resurrection. For me, it is not. I do not worship the Hebrew deity and find
spiritual meaning in another tradition. Jews, Muslims and Sikhs worship the One
God but do not identify Jesus with him. A Spongian creed would contain the
unconvincing affirmation: "I believe that it would be fair to say that in that
moment Peter felt himself to be resurrected."
(1) Spong, John Shelby, Resurrection:
Myth or Reality? New York, 1994.
No comments:
Post a Comment