Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today

by John Shelby Spong

For Paul the resurrection itself places Jesus “at the right hand of God,” not back into human history.

Paul reinforces his understanding when he states earlier in Romans that “the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you . . . [and] will give life to your mortal bodies” (8:11).

Another hint as to Paul’s meaning is also found in Romans. Here Paul says: “Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him” (Rom. 6:9, emphasis added).

For Paul, the Easter event was a matter of being raised to a new dimension of life that he does not, perhaps cannot, describe, but it is beyond the power of death ever to threaten or strike again.

Jesus in the resurrection had not returned to his previous earthly existence, but had entered into the oneness of God. This is clearly what Paul understood the Easter experience to be. A deceased body walking out of a tomb to take up anew the life before his crucifixion simply is not the meaning of Easter that motivated the first author in the New Testament.

What of Paul's experience of the Christ?

Most biblical scholars do not today believe that Paul is the author of the epistle we have named Ephesians.* That epistle appears to have been written as a cover letter that served to introduce a collection of Paul’s authentic epistles, which had been gathered together by his followers, in order to send them to other churches.

So the first step that those of us who wish to explore the meaning of resurrection must take is to recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God.

Before we leave Paul, we have to take seriously a list he included in I Corinthians, which he wrote around the years 54–56 CE. Here Paul states that the Christ, who was raised into God at his death, not into a life of flesh and blood in this world, nonetheless “appeared” to the people on this list (I Cor. 15:3–8). To what kind of experience was Paul referring in this part of his work?

The first thing we note is that the Greek word that has been translated “appeared” was ophthe (ωϕθn). It is the same word used by the Septuagint translators to refer to the God who “appeared” to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus (3:2). It is also the word from which we get our term “ophthalmology,” the science or study of seeing.

Is there a difference between sight and insight, between sight and second sight?

“He appeared first to Cephas,” Paul says. In the mind of Paul, it was Cephas-Peter who was the first to see. Then Peter appears to have opened the eyes of the other members of the apostolic band so that they too could see.

The language Paul uses seems to me to speak of a different kind of seeing from simply having a scene become visible before our eyes. It speaks of a breakthrough in our thinking, leading to a new understanding; it speaks of putting together things that had never been put together before and thus, in that innovative combination, forming a new insight.

The vocation of the Jewish people, he suggested, was not to win, not to achieve power or even nationhood again, but rather to live in such a way as to absorb willingly the world’s hostility, to drain from people their anger, accepting it and returning it to them as love. “The servant,” a symbol for that nation, was to be a willing victim, one who would be “rejected, despised, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3). He was to make the people whole by accepting their abuse, never returning it in kind, but responding to it only with love. That ancient portrait, drawn by this unknown prophet, became the one which the followers of Jesus saw lived out in him.

Was this the vision of God that they saw in Jesus, who called people beyond the barriers of tribe, race, ethnicity and gender?

Resurrection, I now believe, was not a physical act. No formerly deceased body ever walked out of any tomb, leaving it empty to take up a previous life in the world. For Paul and for the other early Christians to whom Paul says Jesus “appeared,” resurrection was, rather, a moment of new revelation that occurred when survival-driven humanity could transcend that limit and give itself away in love to others, including even to those who wish and do us evil.

Was this experience great enough to have been called resurrection? I submit that it was. That experience suggested that God and human life can flow together. It persuaded “believers” that every limit on our humanity can be broken. That is what those early Christians meant when they said: “Jesus lives. We have seen the Lord!”

Resurrection, understood as Paul and the early Christians experienced it, is an ongoing and life-reordering process, not an event that happened once in history a long time ago.

“The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed.” This ancient salute that greeted Easter day did not mean that Jesus had been raised back into the life of human limitations, but that he opened to us access into the meaning of God, as the power to free us to live, to love and to be.

Mark, the earliest gospel to be written, has no account of the risen Christ appearing to anyone at any time within its pages.

You will see the meaning of resurrection, the white-robed messenger seems to say, when you return to your homes and go about the business of your life.

That is, we are resurrected when we learn that God is present when, in the words I use over and over, we live fully, love wastefully and become all that we are capable of being.

The first gospel so very clearly does not say what most of us have always thought and been taught that it says.

Matthew magnifies the miraculous and closes all of the loopholes that he believes Mark has left open. So Mark’s “young man dressed in a white robe” becomes, in Matthew, a supernatural angel in translucent clothing (Matt. 28:2–3). The message of this angel has become much more supernatural: “[Jesus] has risen from the grave. He will go before you to Galilee. There you will see him” (Matt. 28:7).

He speaks. His words would later be called the “Great Commission”: Go into all the world, make disciples of all nations and lo, I am with you always. Was this a missionary charge to go convert the heathen? Not a chance! There was no institutional church at that time that felt the need to gain converts. The risen Christ was saying, rather, go beyond your boundaries, your fears, your lines of security; learn to give yourselves away and know that you are part of who I am. We cannot now be separated! It is a different message of Easter from the one about which we have previously been told.

The messenger in Mark, who became an angel in Matthew, has now become two angels in Luke (Luke 24:4). The body of Christ has become unmistakably physical. Luke’s resurrected Jesus eats, he drinks, he walks, he talks and he interprets scripture (Luke 24:36–49). Yet he also seems to be able to materialize out of thin air and later to dematerialize into thin air (Luke 24:13–35).

Peter is perplexed, but we are told that the “beloved disciple” believes (John 20:2–10). Belief in the resurrection is thus born in the Fourth Gospel, not in the vision of a resurrected body, but in the realization that the boundaries of death have been broken.

Jesus responds with what was surely the reason those two stories were included: “Thomas, have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

God is not a noun we are compelled to define; God is a verb that we are invited to live. There is a difference, and it is in that difference that resurrection is both experienced and entered. That, in the last analysis, is what resurrection is all about.

All three of these gospels were originally created, we now recognize, to provide Jesus stories for the seasons and Sabbaths of the synagogue’s liturgical year.

John the Baptist entered the gospel tradition not as a person of history, but as a Rosh Hashanah literary figure.

The pattern of following the synagogue’s liturgical year served as the organizing principle of the three synoptic gospels, so we find in each of them appropriate Jesus stories for Sukkoth, Dedication and even the minor festivals of the Ninth of Ab and Purim.

Luke, a gospel written to a congregation of diaspora (or dispersed) Jews that was just beginning to attract Gentile proselytes into its midst, had a rather different agenda from that of Matthew. So Elijah, the father of the prophetic movement, served Luke much better than did Moses, as the figure through whom Jesus was to be interpreted. A close reading of Luke reveals this broader world into which Jesus, as the new Elijah, fitted so well.

In the Hebrew scriptures we are told that Elijah raises from the dead the only son of a widow. In Luke’s gospel, as we noted in the section on miracles, Jesus repeats that Elijah story by raising from the dead the only son of a widow in the village of Nain.

The most important detail in this story was that Elisha, seeing the ascension of his master, knew that his request had been granted: He would be endowed with a double portion of Elijah’s powerful, unique and yet still human spirit.

Luke saw Jesus as the new Elijah, but one whom he believed had become far more filled with the presence of God than had been the first Elijah.

The new and greater Elijah was said by Luke to be in possession of God’s Holy Spirit, which he could bequeath not just to a single disciple, but to all of his disciples, then and throughout the ages.

Luke knew that his ascension story, along with his Pentecost account, was not literal history, but he also knew that the inclusive love of God was universal, so he told this story. Today we are invited to hear its meaning, and to escape its literal understanding. Gospel truth can never finally be contained in the vocabulary of our humanity.

The judgment as to the goodness or badness of a particular human action depends, not just on the act itself, but on the context in which the act is carried out.

Good and evil are not fixed categories; they never have been. No matter what the religious claims of the past have been, it is now impossible to build an ethical system on the basis of an unchanging or eternal standard.

From where does the human sense arise that some things are good and others are evil?

To many conservative Christians, rampant immorality appeared to be the only real alternative to the cultural move away from this code of antiquity.

Most people do not know that there is a wide sectarian disagreement over the order and even the way the commandments are numbered.

Another indicator of the demise came for me with the realization that the form the commandments possess now has more importance than the content.

This exercise revealed to me that if average churchgoers do not know what the Ten Commandments are, then they can no longer claim, with any sense of real conviction, that the commandments themselves are still important.

The fact is, however, that the Hebrew scriptures contain three versions of the Ten Commandments and they do not agree with each other.

Tradition alone has dictated that the version found in Exodus 20 is the official version. A brief analysis of this Exodus list, however, will reveal that it is different from anything that Moses might have received.

How do we know? Because the commandment regarding the observance of the Sabbath in the Exodus 20 list was edited, we’ve learned through biblical scholarship, to bring it into conformity with the seven-day story of creation with which the Hebrew Bible opens. That Genesis chapter, we now know, was one of the last parts of the Hebrew scriptures to be composed. It was the product...

So we have to assume, first, that an oral tradition carried the Ten Commandments from the time of Moses to the much later written form, which is in an earlier document of the Jewish people that we call the Elohist document.

It is interesting to note that the version of the Ten Commandments found in Deuteronomy 5, which was written during the latter years of the seventh century BCE, also calls for the Sabbath to be observed, not on the basis of God resting on the seventh day (for that narrative had not yet been written), but on the fact that the Jews were to remember that they had once been slaves in Egypt and that even slaves, to say nothing of the cattle and other beasts of burden, deserved a day of rest (v. 15).

The third version of the Ten Commandments, but probably the oldest of the three lots, is found in Exodus 34.