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

by John Shelby Spong

No, there was something far earlier and perhaps more profound about this Jesus that caused his followers to make the God claim for him. It was, I believe, the breaking down of all the boundaries and barriers by which we human beings separate ourselves from one another. The power of God seen in Jesus was the overcoming of all our fears and divisions. In his presence and through the experience of his life, the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Jew and Samaritan, male and female, Israel and Judah, bound and free, rich and poor, and life and death all faded away. In Jesus there was a humanity that included all and that dismissed none. In this Jesus a human community without boundaries could be seen. God was the power of life, the passion of love, the Ground of Being that draws all lives into a new humanity. That was the experience that drove first Paul and later many others to say of this Jesus: “God was in Christ” (II Cor. 5:19).