In Spong’s new book on the Gospel of John, he shows that the author is speaking to a specific community of Christians as they try to understand the Jesus story in terms of their current experience as a Jesus community around 100 A.D. Originally a synagogue-related Jewish sect in Jerusalem, worshiping in the Temple, they saw Jesus as the long expected Messiah. They experienced rising hostility from the leaders of the synagogue, especially at the claim that there was a oneness with Jesus and God. This hostility became more acute after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. followed by mass resettling of Jews elsewhere. One synagogue which included the Johannine group of Jews very possibly settled in Ephesus, but the Jesus group were finally expelled from the synagogue no later than 88 A.D. No wonder that John’s Gospel reflects this hostility to those Jewish synagogue leaders by referring to them as, “The Jews.” (How tragic for later Christian history when this became interpreted to mean all Jews.)
So the Fourth Gospel was written for that Johannine community to interpret the Jesus story in their current situation. They have been separated from their Jewish roots. They are being persecuted. And the expected return of Jesus together with God’s Kingdom has not happened. So John is writing to those who are becoming disillusioned, some of whom may even be contemplating return to the synagogue – maybe some have already returned. But John’s writing reflects a popular first-century form of Jewish mysticism. It is not biography, it is not history. He tells the story of Jesus by introducing a series of characters, some named from the other three Gospels, others who are new, using them not as historical figures, but symbolically to introduce a series of discourses presenting Jesus as he must now be seen in these new circumstances of 100 AD.
In Spong’s earlier book, Eternal Life: A New Vision he described John’s resulting vision of Jesus.
“John’s Gospel read through the eyes of a mystic or viewed through the eyes of mysticism is . . . the story not of a divine life invading the world, but of a human life named Jesus of Nazareth. Yet the gospel portrays this Jesus as revealing a deeper and freer self-consciousness that is so profound that the usual human barriers disappeared. John portrays Jesus as having a relationship with the holy that is of indistinguishable identity. Jesus is not absorbed into the holy. Jesus is rather alive with the holy. Jesus, for John, is the life through which the voice of God is heard speaking, the being through which the Ground of Being is experienced as present. God from outside does not enter the human Jesus, as Mark suggests happened at baptism and as Matthew and Luke say occurred at the moment of conception. There is rather in this gospel a kind of intrinsic, inseparable unity, the result of which does not make Jesus more than human, but it does make him fully human and thus fully one with all that God is.” [p. 167]
“Jesus was a human life so deeply lived, a human life through which love flowed without barrier or interception, a being so courageously present that he was open to the ultimate ground of all being. He had stepped from self-consciousness into a universal consciousness that brings us into a profound oneness with all there is. He had become one with God.” [p. 168]
“By the time John’s Gospel was written near the end of the first century . . . the language of mysticism, of human oneness with the divine, of a life that knew no boundaries, had transformed the earlier language of miracle and magic, of angels that sing and stars that wander. When John relates the account of the feeding of the five thousand it has ceased to be a miracle story and has become a symbolic eucharistic meal in which Jesus becomes the infinite Lamb of God that can feed all the lives of the world that hunger for meaning. . . . Even the story of the crucifixion, as told by John, is the story of the transforming gift that comes when one lives in the face of rejection and gives life to those who think they are taking it away. The ability to give oneself away is the mark of having touched the transcendent. [ p. 170]
“John’s mystical approach to Jesus shouts the reality that we share in the life of God, just as Jesus did. We share in the being of God, just as Jesus did. Does that mean that our consciousness shares in the consciousness of God? I think it does, and as we become more deeply and fully conscious, we move from the being of survival to the being of love, and we participate in and reveal the reality of God. . . . What the mystics seem to grasp almost intuitively is that God is not a being external to life. . . The mystical perception, more experienced than believed, more intuitive than doctrinal, is that God is the ultimate being which our beings share. . . . This is what it means to be human and what it means to be one in whom the life of God lives, the love of God loves, and the being of God is made manifest. That is the doorway into freedom, into maturity, into, as the epistle to the Ephesians says, ‘mature manhood [and womanhood] . . . the measure of the stature and fullness of Christ’ where we will ‘no longer be children, tossed to and fro . . . We are to grow up in every way’ (John 4:13-17) ” [p. 171]
Loren Bullock
June 30, 1912, revised August 25, 2013
Salvation means being saved. But saved from what? The answer we hear most often was developed from the two Creation stories in Genesis. In the first story, God created perfect human beings as a part of all creation. “God saw that it was good.” But in the second story, as a result of evil influences, Adam and Eve, representing all human beings, disobeyed God and chose to become imperfect, resulting in human pain and suffering and were evicted from the garden thus becoming separated or estranged from God. Thus all humans must be saved from that “original” human sin or estrangement from God. Note that the word “sin” is from the Latin, sine, meaning “without.” Our human sin is living without God. But I cannot accept that each human being is born without God’s spirit as an integral spark within.
We now know that humans were not created perfectly at a single moment in time only to then choose imperfection. Rather human beings have evolved relatively recently over the long development of life from its simplest forms. And in each life there is a struggle for survival and this is a very strong instinct that we have inherited from our evolutionary ancestors. In addition, we humans have evolved with an awareness of self plus an amazing capability of imagination. As a result, we develop insecurities along with instinctive fears and suspicions of strangers that create so much evil in the world. Our behavior becomes self-serving. Our real salvation therefore is to be saved from letting our animal instincts take over, to let that love within each of us dominate our behavior, to let that experience of God expand within each of us, to strive to become more fully human, as Jesus was fully human as well as fully holy.
To say it in simpler words, salvation is being found after being lost. Even children seem to understand what being lost is like. So being saved by God means never being lost from God. And I cannot believe that we are born lost. I see God’s presence in every newborn baby! But we can grow to ignore that presence, we can let those animal instincts that are so a part of us take control. Then we let our fears and suspicions and hatreds take over and we hurt each other. We even kill. That is the evil that we bring onto others as well as ourselves. But that spark of God is still within each human, if we will only choose to let it grow. We humans need to be saved from ourselves, from our instinctual selfishness, letting God’s spirit lead us to become more fully human.
That is what I understand by the familiar phrase, “Jesus saves!” But I prefer the verse from John 14:20, “Know that I am in my father, and I in you, and you in me.”
Loren Bullock
November 3, 2012, revised February 21, 2013
Bishop John Shelby Spong in 2009 published Eternal Life: A New Vision. In his January 31, 2013, essay on his web site (johnshelbyspong.com) , he describes how he approached his study of the subject of eternity. Following is an excerpt from that essay which is a tribute to a long and close friend, Malcolm Warnock who recently died at 107.
“ First, the fact is that this subject, which might be called both “the unknown and the unknowable,” has never stopped human speculation. The greatest libraries of the world contain countless volumes in which learned men and women have sought to explore humanity’s ultimate limit and the source of humanity’s deepest anxiety. Some of those volumes have become classics in the literature of the western world. One thinks of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained or Paul Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for example. More important, however, . . . I did not in this project plan to engage in speculation into the unknown. I rather planned to approach life after death through the medium of life itself – about which a great deal can be known. Can I go deeply enough into the meaning of life that I can touch the limits? Can I discover the edge of humanity where it appears to enter the divine, where time ceases and eternity begins and where the barriers that surround life fade away and we discover that there is a universal consciousness in which we all participate? If I can do that, it will be through that means that I will approach the subject of life after death. . . . I was not on a mission to affirm the pious claims of traditional religion or to defend the popular ecclesiastical definitions of God, who seemed to use life after death as a method of behavior control or even to affirm the reality of those now empty realms that we have in the past called heaven and hell.”
“The only way I know how to approach the subject of eternity is to live fully in the present. The only way I know to discuss timelessness is to engage deeply and fully the gift of time that we now have. The only way I know how to approach the idea of divinity is to be fully human now, expanding all limits, transcending all barriers. I understand God as the Source of life empowering me to live fully; as the Source of love enabling me to love wastefully; as the Ground of Being giving me the courage to be everything I am capable of being. So it is in living fully, loving wastefully and being all that I can be that I experience the presence of God and it was, I am fully convinced, this same God experience that caused the followers of Jesus to view him as one in whom and through whom God was present. So they said of Jesus: ‘God was in Christ.’ What this phrase was seeking to communicate is that somehow, in someway, through some means, they saw the presence of God in the fully alive, wastefully-loving Jesus.
“This was the God that Malcolm also understood and this was the God with whom Malcolm lived. He worshiped this God of life, love and being by living fully, by loving wastefully and by being all that he could be. To Malcolm, God was not a being to be pleased, so much as God was a verb to be lived.
“He was a remarkable man. I am glad I knew him. I am confident that in his life he crossed the barrier where time enters eternity, where the human enters the divine and where the consciousness of the universe begins to include the consciousness of this incredible man.”
Loren Bullock
January 31, 2012
THE BEGINNINGS OF DEVOTION TO JESUS
One of the surprising developments within the fledgling group of the “Followers of The Way” that became known as Christians was how soon they were expressing intense devotion to Jesus as part of their devotion to God. The transforming experience of Christ’s presence within each of them found early expression in new devotional practices centering on Jesus. These first “Christians” were a small messianic group of Jews, and at first they still worshiped as Jews, going to the Temple in Jerusalem and worshiping in synagogues with other Jews. Synagogues were in most towns by this time. There would be recitation of prayer, chanting of Psalms, and scripture reading and instruction. For example, each of the Gospels tells of Jesus “reading” in synagogues. So, these early “Christians” probably also told stories of Jesus, most likely in the context of the just-read scripture. This would be the beginning of the oral tradition that is reflected in Paul’s letters written approximately 51 – 58 A.D. as well as in the Gospels written approximately 65 – 90 A.D. As objections mounted to their claims about Jesus as Messiah from more orthodox Jews, the new Christians increasingly became separated from the synagogues, and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 A.D. hastened the development of Christianity apart from rabbinic Judaism.
In addition to reading scripture as they worshiped, these new Christians also developed other new devotional practices centering on Jesus. Initiation, for example, included baptism “in the name of Jesus.” The Christian common meal became a sacred meal remembering or reenacting the sacrifice of Jesus. Hymns were sung or more likely chanted. Prayers were offered to God “through” Jesus and “in Jesus name,” and even direct prayer was addressed to Jesus himself. All this happened within very possibly the first few years after Jesus death!
It is in this seminal period of those first twenty years of Christianity, that a hymn or ode was written that Paul quotes in Philippians 2:5-11. Paul seems to assume that by the time of his letter (ca. 52-53 A.D.) it is something already widely familiar.
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death –
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Was this perhaps sung or chanted or recited in the worship meetings of the earliest years? Scholars seem to think so. Yet how surprisingly familiar are the words as part of our liturgy even today!
The first thing to note about this hymn is its Jewishness. It comes from Jewish roots. It alludes to concepts in the Hebrew scripture regarding exaltation and obeisance that would be familiar to Hebrew hearers. But it is also distinctively Christian. And it is early – maybe from as early as 35 – 40 A.D. Among the significant concepts that are already included in this hymn are the humanity/divinity of Jesus, Jesus as Lord, God’s post-resurrection exaltation of Jesus, and Jesus’ pre-existence with God. Moreover, as Jews, those first “Christians” worshiping in the synagogues would insist that there is only one God. Interestingly, Jesus’ redemptive role as savior is not mentioned. Nor is there any mention of physical resurrection appearances. All this even before Paul wrote his letters. It is these and other writings of that first century that gave rise to the myriad complex and often contentious discussions and articulation of doctrines about Jesus and God for the next several centuries. Yet it seems to me that just maybe these words reflect the very words from the resurrection experiences of the Disciples and first “Christians” themselves! Wow!
Loren Bullock
November 26, 2012
Dr. Larry Hurtado, New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity has studied those early years, and he has written, “Perhaps within only a few days or weeks of his crucifixion, Jesus’ followers were circulating the astonishing claim that God had raised him from death and had installed him in heavenly glory as Messiah and the appointed vehicle of redemption. Moreover . . . [his] followers were according him a level of devotion that far exceeded their own prior and impressive commitment to him in his lifetime. In the earliest extant artifacts of the Christian movement (texts written scarcely more than twenty years after Jesus death), we see an amazingly exalted level of devotion to Jesus which at that early point was already commonplace among circles of his followers spread across a wide geographical area.” [Larry Hurtado, How On Earth Did Jesus Become God? (2005) p.4-5]
BELIEF AND FAITH
Our beliefs reflect our intellectual conclusions about our world and ourselves. They assume therefore that we have given some thought and have gone through some reasoning process to reach those conclusions. But all too often, we tend to accept what others tell us to believe. We even ask sometimes, “What am I supposed to believe?” We are bombarded by advertising telling us what to believe about everything from soap and cars to medicines and political candidates. We have become skeptical and even cynical about what we are told to believe. We even question whom to believe. We need to appreciate that as human beings, we have an impressive brain with which we can think and reason for ourselves, with which we can evaluate and distinguish ideas from other peoples’ thinking and conclusions. We can be educated!
As children we usually accept our parents’ beliefs without much thinking, for they “know everything.” But as we get older we discover that some of those earlier beliefs need to be modified or even supplanted because of new knowledge. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, for Magellan sailed around it, and the astronauts have circled it and taken pictures. We can no longer believe that God literally sits on a throne in a place just above the sky, for our present cosmology is of a universe of moving galaxies and stars in space-time. Our understandings and beliefs about ourselves and our world have changed and grown as science has provided so much new knowledge.
But most people and institutions are uncomfortable with change. The Christian Church in particular has developed creeds that have become icons themselves, still being recited some 1,600 or more years later as statements of belief. It took the Catholic Church 400 years to admit that Galileo’s beliefs were right! Only in the 1990s did the Catholic Church admit that Darwin was right – although somewhat limitedly. Many Christians – Protestants as well as Catholics – are still being told by their church and their leaders what to believe, all the time ignoring even long-accepted science.
Why do we put so much emphasis on belief? The Greek word in the Bible is “pistis,” and it does mean belief, conviction of the truth of anything, giving assent to propositional statements. But it also means trust or a willingness to put one’s confidence into something or someone. The Latin word for that is “fides” from which we get our English words, fidelity and faith. So to me faith is having trust and confidence in God, without a necessary dependence on an intellectual belief about God. For me God is to be experienced, to be a living part of me. Creedal statements are helpful guides for the development of my understanding and experience of God, but the words of the creeds must be understandable in the context of current knowledge. So I accept the old words from another time as a precious heritage of our Christian story, as words reflecting very real God experiences of those writers. But I welcome new creeds that reflect our new knowledge and new experiences.
After all, how I live is more important than what I say. Freeman Dyson, noted physicist and devoted Christian, said, “Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus according to the Gospels thought so too.”
Loren Bullock
October 23, 2012
The following are comments by Dr.Willard Gaylin, a practicing psychiatrist, a Bioethicist and cofounder in 1969 of the Hastings Institute which studies the relationships between biology and ethics. He is the author of Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence (2003). The comments below are my excerpts from a 1988 dialog that Bill Moyers had with Dr Gaylin and published in the book, A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers (1989) p.119ff.
When Moyers asked Dr Gaylen, “What do you think is the most pressing ethical issue we have to face ?” Gaylen replied, “ The most important thing we face is a rediscovery of community. We are a very individually oriented country, and I love that. But somewhere along the line we’ve gotten a peculiar idea of what an individual is, what individual pleasure is, and what individual purpose is. But . . . the human being is not like an amoeba, it’s not a thing. We’re much more like coral, we’re interconnected. We cannot survive without each other. But now communities have broken down . Most people don’t take religious community that seriously any more. It’s tough to identify with something called New York City. In the pursuit of individual liberties we have allowed a corruption of the public space, so that there are areas that are not safe, and where that happens, there is no individual liberty. The people who are living in Harlem, who cannot go out to shop at night because of the crack addicts, are in a prison, and we’ve helped create the prison by ignoring what community means in this country.
“For instance, there’s a shibboleth against institutions and home care. Do you know what home care is for most people? It’s solitary confinement! We have to rediscover institutions. I would rather be among seven other older and helpless people with one nurse and a housekeeper than confined in solitary confinement even as a wealthy man who could afford around-the-clock nursing. We have to rediscover community. . . The idea that we can actually do things for something broader – a community – is lost.
“Human beings require food, water, protection from the elements, heat, and other human beings. If a child is deprived of contact with human beings, even if you give him perfect nourishment, he becomes an incomplete adult. He loses those qualities that are most identified with being human: the capacity to form attachments, the capacity to have guilt, the capacity to see the future – in other words, the capacity to have conscience and love.
“Somehow or other we’ve developed a concept of personal pleasure, of personal fulfillment – let it all hang out, do your own thing – so that all of pleasure is seen as a quick fix, as an isolated experience. The concept of attachment, the concept of service, the concept that somehow pleasure can involve pain or sacrifice – those ideas have simply been dissipated in our culture. . . I happen to know that service is empowering. It’s great. It’s terrific!
“I believe that service involves pain, but once experienced, will never be traded. The most pleasurable thing I ever did in my life was raise my kids. It’s also the most painful thing I ever did in my life. It was agonizing! So I am optimistic that if we begin to introduce people to service, we will see that they are hungry for it, hungry for a cause. And I’ll tell you something – if we don’t give them a good cause, they’ll find a bad one. People want someone to show them a better way. It worries me that we have generations of children being born without the capacity for caring, without figures to identify with. This is a ticking time-bomb.
“ ‘No man is an island’ is a biological as well as a poetic truth.”
Loren Bullock
September 14, 2012
“It is well, it is well with my soul,” goes the refrain of a familiar old hymn. It was written in 1873 by Horatio Spafford following a series of tragedies which included losing four daughters in a ship collision at sea. Only their mother survived, telegraphing Horatio in Chicago, “Saved alone.” He immediately sailed to Europe to meet her, and on their return trip, after passing over the site of the sinking, he wrote the words for which in 1876 Philip Bliss composed the hymn tune, naming it Ville du Havre, after the lost ship.
“I am well,” is a similar phrase, a key response of Wayne Dyer, a current author and popular TV speaker, to the question, “How are you?” That question is often answered with phrases like, “Not too good,” or “I’m OK,” or “I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” – all referring to our bodily aches and infirmities. But Wayne Dyer makes the point that my body is not “me.” In fact, my body is not the same body that it was last week or last year. For my body is constantly changing, replacing cells, renewing itself. But there is one thing that is unchanging from the time I was born. And that is what I know as ME. There is a constancy in the “me” that I have known all my life. There is a sense of self that grows in awareness and feelings through the years, to a degree that is uniquely human, and there is something about it that is always “me.” The traditional word for that is “soul.” It is that spark of God within me. Sometimes we can be acutely aware of it. At other times that sense may become distant. But that is what I understand Wayne Dyer to mean when he says, “I am well!” The body may have its aches and pains – in fact it may be seriously ill or injured – but the “I” that is “me” is fine – is well.
Meister Eckert, a 10th Century mystic described it simply, “My me is God!” Yes! That is my affirmation. That is the affirmation of my Christian faith. The God that Jesus worshiped was recognized as being so integral to the human Jesus that it could only be described by others as God being “in” Jesus. And those early disciples soon experienced that same presence of God within themselves , describing it as Jesus being still alive to them! And we still experience that same presence within us if we let it and accept it and not shut it out. I can’t explain it. I don’t try. Words are inadequate to describe the ineffable, the unexplainable.
So yes, I AM WELL! I am a part of the amazing process of creation and life that is everywhere. I am grateful for the privilege of being me. I see God in the creativity that is all around me – in the beauty of nature, in the complexity of the universe, and in the amazing realization that the universe is even comprehensible. I see God in the creativity that is in music and art that speaks to me in so many ways. And I see God especially in my relationships to everyone around me. For it is in the love that is in those relationships that I glimpse what it is to become more fully human. And it becomes very specific when I consider those closest to me: my wife, my children, and all my extended family and close friends. This is how I know and experience God.
It is well with my soul!
Loren Bullock
May 27, 2012
First of all is my recognition that I am a human being. As such, I am constrained in a living body that is a part of all of life. I was conceived, was born, and will die. That in itself is a profound and wonderful mystery. As a living human being, I am therefore related to all of life. And relationship is my primary human function. It is why I am here. It means relationships not only to other human beings, but also to all the other life around me, including the animals and trees and flowers. It is in these relationships to other life – and especially to other persons – that I see God. And the closest word describing these relationships is LOVE.
I also find myself in a universe of both incredible minuteness and mind-boggling vastness. That it is at all comprehensible to a human being is itself a profound mystery. And it is in Creation that has been and is still taking place even now, and particularly in the story of the evolution of life on this small planet earth located in one of myriad galaxies in time and space that I also see God. And the word describing this is AWE.
And this love and this awe become real whenever my two-year-old grandson, Alex, comes running to me and climbs into my lap and we just sit together.
Loren Bullock
Sept 6, 2007
I have been a student all my life. My formal studies were in mathematics and physics. I have since become an avid student of history and biography as well as theology and the Bible. I am fascinated by the complexity and vastness of the universe, that our human minds have been able to begin understanding its forces and relationships, as well as the amazing process of our evolution, and more recently the unraveling of DNA with all its implications. I am awed by the miracle of life itself, lost in the wonder of a new-born baby. I am increasingly aware of the mystery of it all, plus the realization that I neither can nor need explain God. Rather, I have come to experience God personally both within me and also in my relationships with nature and with all life and especially with my relationships with other people. This is where I see and feel God.
All this is summarized so succinctly in a poem by Mary Oliver that includes the following sentence*:
“Though I play at the edges of knowing,
truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving.”
I have all my life been fascinated by everything around me – learning and exploring and asking how and why – the “edges of knowing” – and that’s been play to me. But how much more to life is the experiencing of life – the “looking, the touching, the loving.”
Loren Bullock
July 7, 2005
*Why I Wake Early, new poems by Mary Oliver, 2004 Beacon Press, Boston, page 5
M Loren Bullock 