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Review Summary: Awesome |
Date: 2009-01-09 |
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Details: I am plowing toward the end of this book that I bought about a week ago, and I already just feel so enriched. I was raised Catholic, but I've been struggling with existentialist and religious identity questions since I was ten. I have tried to get into the Bible and religion before, alternately from a spiritual quest and an academic one. But I never could make it through much of all the "begets" and grammatical structure that was often strange to me. And all church and most religious books did for me was give me more opinion and dogma thick with judgment and strict frameworks on how to live and what to think...
The title of this book is perfect, for clearly the author has Agnostics and Athiests in mind as he peels away layers of centuries of interpretation, tradition, and stuffy hateful (as in sexist, racist, world religion-ist, and diverse-ist; forgive my making up of words) history to present a Jesus as human as he was touching, enlightened and inspiring.
I believe that the Jesus experience at it's bare-bones core is not dissimilar to the experience of the Buddha (whom I've also been curious about in my search for something my mind and heart could embrace), in the sense that they both sought to help the world out of suffering and find true peace of mind. (In spite of Buddhism's non-diety insistence, people seem to pay homage to his likeness in quasi-worship all the time... but I digress.)
Who knows, by the time I finish this book, perhaps I will have found a Jesus I can get behind. I think those who consider themselves Christians in the stricter and more traditional sense would do well to consider that. For instead of dismissing us unsatisfied searchers as heathen non-believers, here is a guy who believes in a Jesus whose purpose was to bring tortured hearts closer to God (in any concept of the word that you care to subscribe to; be it Fate, Krishna or The Force) and not a guy who stood for categorizing people into the "saved" and the "damned" based on a simplistic, parent-child system of reward and punishment.
Perhaps, by being open enough to enter such a dialogue on the historical Jesus, Christianity, as he said, can be saved. For to simply condemn the intellectuals and indecisive over centuries-old self-contradicting dogma is to reject the progress of mankind toward a peaceful and enlightened future. |
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Review Summary: Godology |
Date: 2009-01-06 |
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Details: This book is properly titled, and not written for anyone who is religious, or fully immersed in their beliefs. Along with "Honest to God" by J.T. Robinson, and "Jesus Now" by a former Priest, I think this fits very well into a sequence of books that attempt to make Jesus relevant to people in a time period that is 2000 years removed from his life on earth. Bishop Spong follows a path that dates back to the German theologians who recognized that New Testament myth has been accepted as true history by most mainline Christians. The canonical books were chosen in an attempt to prove the humanity and divinity of Jesus at a crucial time in the history of the church. He strips away the miraculous claims with an appeal to reason, while maintaining that Jesus is still relevant to faith in God. Anyone who has trouble reconciling his beliefs with what the Church expects, will find this book helpful and provocative.
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Review Summary: Imaginative |
Date: 2009-01-03 |
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Details: Jesus for the Non-Religious by John Shelby Spong is a book that dismisses lots of the dogmas of the Catholic Church. It's his version of the Bible and what he likes, he keeps in and what he doesn't like, he dismisses. He is a retired Episcopal Bishop who found his own path to follow. Jesus is quoted as saying, "Preach my word as best you can" and I guess this is the best Spong can.
There is another beautiful new book on Jesus entitled "The Enlightenment, What God Told Me After One Million Prayers: A Message for Everyone," by John H. Eagan. I just finished it. It's really great and deals with Jesus' teachings and His Passion. It brought me to tears. I think the readers of Spong's book will really enjoy The Enlightenment.
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Review Summary: The Impact of a Blown-Out Man |
Date: 2008-12-24 |
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Details: Spong reads the gospels, not looking for facts, but for signs of how the story tellers were changed. What defensive walls, fears, hypocrisies or self-centered views of life have been blown down by encounters with Jesus?
In pursuing this kind of encounter, Spong traces almost every phrase or image in the gospels back to the Old Testament, from which they were composed, often word for word. I've never seen such a detailed exposure of how the Jesus stories were literally written "according to the [Hebrew] scriptures".
Where does all this lead? Strangely enough, the exposure of Jewish roots recovers Jesus' challenge to the people of his times, and to ours. It exposes the impact of his life to ordinary people of that culture, and what that impact might be for an utterly different global civilization.
--author of "Different Visions of Love" |
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Review Summary: Past the Idolatry of Scripture |
Date: 2008-12-07 |
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Details: Phenomenal. I could not read this book fast enough. (Spong validates what I have believed for years but did not have the biblical scholarship to fully verbalize it.) To my ear, he is a little preachy and may be a little harsh to those immersed in traditional Christianity, but I feel he gets his message through of a radical, new, life-affirming ("abundant life") Christianity.
Basically, he wants us to get us past the literal, past the symbolic, past the liturgical dogma of religion-as-an-establishment (past the idolatry of written words and the idolatry of a man) to the core message of Jesus of Nazareth, which has powerful meaning to the world -- regardless of religion or culture.
He is not suggesting "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" or subscribing to a believe-it-all-or-believe-nothing attitude as some more fundamental Christians have said in the reviews and blogs on this book I have read.
It is a book that needs to be read all the way through, though. However, if you come from an "inerrant word of G-d" background, you will most likely find the first part too painful to continue. If this is the case, I highly recommend that you read his introduction then skip to the last third section...and then go back and read the first two-thirds. You may not agree with Spong's conclusions, but you will have given him a chance to fully argue his points...and to experience Jesus of Nazareth in a whole, new way. If you come from a non-religious or hurt-by-Christianity background, I think you will be inspired by the potential of Spong's viewpoint. |
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out of 73 Reviews
