Spong: Theism capturing the Jesus story

In the next two chapters, which I will take together, Spong looks at how the theistic story of Christ grew over the years, and he makes an attempt to work out as far as possible what was the original story of Jesus before all the theistic overtones got added.

Spong regards all the theistic additions as unnecessary. He argues of the theistic interpretation of Jesus as the Incarnate Son of God:

It is not original; it was added to an earlier portrait of Jesus. Because it was added to Jesus, it can also be taken off: the theistic interpretation of Jesus does not have to be eternal; theism can die.

In order to demonstrate this, he engages in a bit of commentary on Biblical scholarship and criticism, describing the probable order of writing of the various books of the New Testament.

He mentions that Paul

was converted and baptized, became a missionary, engaged in the controversial task of defining the Christian faith against powerful opponents such as Peter and James whom he called ‘the Lord’s Brother’, completed all of his journeys, wrote all his epistles, and was imprisoned and executed in Rome before any of the canonical gospels was written. There is no evidence that Paul ever had access to a Gospel, if any had in fact been written.

And Paul’s understanding of Jesus is very different from that of the Gospel-writers.

Spong also looks at the Gospel of Thomas and “source Q” whose existence can be inferred from the fact that when you remove those bits of Luke and Matthew which have been taken from Mark, there is a significant body of material still in common between the two Gospels, which points to the possibility that both had access to another document which is now lost. Spong points out that according to these early sources Jesus was not a worker of miracles – there are no miracle stories in either Q or Thomas.

According to Spong, the Gospels themselves were not intended to be historical documents, but rather had a liturgical purpose. Mark’s gospel (the first of the four to be written) fits extremely neatly as a set of readings to be used in synagogue worship through part of the Jewish liturgical year. The start of the Gospel fits the theme of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) has Jesus healing the sick, the Feast of Tabernacles coincides with Jesus telling harvest parables, and the transfiguration story fits the Festival of Dedication, in which Jews celebrated the time when the light of God was restored to the Temple. Mark (writing after the temple was destroyed in AD 70) offers Jesus as the new temple, the new meeting place between God and human life. The crucifixion and resurrection fits with Passover.

Matthew expanded this theme so that the entire liturgical year could be covered with Christian readings. He provided additional readings (either by expanding Mark’s stories or providing entirely new material) to cover the period from mid April to early September omitted by Mark.

The one major Jewish festival not covered by Mark’s Gospel was Pentecost/Shavuot, which falls within this period. Matthew has Jesus go (like Moses) up a high mountain. Moses returned with the Ten Commandments and the Law. Jesus made the Sermon on the Mount, which is an eight-part commentary on the Beatitudes, found in Psalm 119. For the Jews, Pentecost was a 24-hour liturgical celebration, and Psalm 119 was written in eight parts, each part to be read as part of each three-hour section of the celebration. Each of the sections of the Sermon on the Mount was designed to accompany it.

Matthew fills out the period without major festivals by adding a genealogy, a birth narrative, an expanded baptism story, an expanded temptation story, and a more dramatic resurrection story, complete with earthquakes and the dead rising from their tombs.

Luke and John make further dramatic developments, and in the process, Jesus becomes less and less human and more and more miraculous and godlike.

Spong’s main point in describing all this is to show how the story of Jesus grew in the telling. His argument is that this is evidence of a progressively increased theistic understanding taking over the Jesus story, and that if we strip away these later accretions we can come back to an original nontheistic understanding of Jesus.

The problem with this interpretation is that it seems to me to be both incomplete and founded on an inaccurate premise. Firstly, the Jews of Jesus’ day were thoroughgoing theists – Judaism as a religion hasn’t become theistic in the two thousand years since Jesus, it was most definitely theistic at the time. Second, if the later writings are embellishments and elaborations on an earlier and simpler tale, this fact is not of itself evidence that the earlier tale is either true or (if true) indicative that Jesus was anything more than an unusually good itinerant preacher and teacher within the context of his religion.

Spong ends the chapter asking what a nontheistic Christianity would look like, once the death of theism is accepted and the theistic understandings of the Jesus story are stripped away.

There is an all-too-human response to these sorts of issues which I have mentioned before. The response of Christians to having these awkward issues pointed out to them is either to deny the evidence and assert the primacy of scripture over evidence (which is broadly speaking the fundamentalist position) or to retreat into a set of untestable propositions (which is more or less the liberal position). It seems to me that Spong hovers uneasily between an extreme end of the liberal position and outright atheism. He denies the theistic interpretation of God, but seeks to put something which seems awfully untestable in its place.

My Grandfather

He died many years ago, when I was still a student. I remember many stories he told - for instance of being in the Home Guard and on duty in Coventry the night it was heavily bombed in November 1940.

There are two stories that I would like to recall.

One is a small and harmless trick he would play on visiting grandchildren. In the flowerbed just outside his front door, he had a collection of brightly coloured pebbles which he had picked up from beaches around the country. And he introduced all the grandchildren to the hobby of "stonewatching".

"If you look carefully at these stones from day to day, you will notice that they change colour a little. And from the change in colour, you can tell what the weather will be today."

This all seemed immensely plausible to a 4-year-old boy, especially coming from the lips of a wise old grandfather who had been a headteacher before he retired, and who therefore knew perfectly well how to sound extremely authoritative to young children. So I would stare and stare at these stones, and of course I convinced myself that I had seen some change of colour in them.

I rather suspect that the story had two purposes. One was to let him have a bit of peace for a while by getting me harmlessly and quietly occupied with something. But I also suspect that he had another purpose, that I would only understand properly when I had grown up, which was to trust the evidence of my own eyes ahead of what I was told by others, no matter how wise or authoritative they seem.

Stonewatching has become part of my family folklore. All my brothers and sisters and cousins were taken in by it. I don't have grandchildren yet, but if and when the first one is born, I think I will start collecting some coloured pebbles...

The other story is one he used to tell of the time when he was a young man, and going into the city centre he would often be accosted by preachers who would ask "Are you saved?"

Now this was a tricky question. If you answered "No", then they would immediately go about trying to save you. If you answered "Yes", they would grab you by the elbow and say "Well, then you must come and help me save somebody else."

So, my grandfather developed the following response.

"Well, yes as it happens I am saved, but it was such a close thing that I don't really like to talk about it."

The preachers, not quite knowing what to make of this response and whether he was being serious or not, left him alone.

Spong: Beyond theism but not beyond God?

In Chapter three, Spong takes up again the thesis that theism grew up alongside the development of our self-consciousness, essentially as a way of re-assuring ourselves that something of us would continue after we die.

Again, I have problems with this idea, first of all because I don’t think it is a complete and sufficient explanation. For instance, I think it gives too little credit to the idea that we tend to anthropomorphize everything. We are conscious agents with intelligence and intentions, and we can see that animals are the same to some extent. If animals, then why not thunderstorms, the sun, clouds, waterfalls and trees waving in the wind? Even now, though we know better, emotionally we can sometimes feel that inanimate objects are conspiring to frustrate us.

Secondly, as I understand it, theistic religions (at least, the early animistic versions of them) predate the belief in life after death, and the idea of life after death is not a necessary part of all religions, it just happens to be a major aspect of the religions we are most familiar with today. If that is the case, then religion originally was not (as Spong claims) primarily about easing the angst of our impending earthly demise.

In chapter four, “Beyond Theism but Not Beyond God” Spong starts looking to see if there is any way in which we can describe what he calls the God-experience in a new way. I’ve read through the chapter several times, and I have to say I find it somewhat incoherent. It seems to me that he is trying to describe our experience of God without defining the God we are experiencing. God is not a supernatural theistic deity, and yet is still something apart from the natural world – which rather suggests that Spong is finding it very hard to find a description that moves away from a supernatural being periodically invading the world to achieve the divine will.

Sometimes, God gets described as a symbol. “The God we once saw theistically as a being can now also be seen as a symbol of Being itself.” And later he says “This God is the source of life, the source of love, the Ground of Being. The theistic God of yesterday is a symbol for the essence, the being of life in which we share. God is life, we say, and we worship this God by living fully.”

Now it seems to me that Spong is trying to have his cake and eat it. He is claiming the nonreality of the theistic God, is talking symbolically of the nontheistic God he seeks to discover in its place, and yet claims that it has a reality that goes beyond the merely symbolic.

I can do symbolism as well as the next person, and if Spong wanted to say that God is the word he uses to represent everything that is best in the human experience of Life and Love, then I would have had no difficulty with that. But it seems he wants more than this, a God with an existence independent of the symbolism we associate with the word, even as he claims that the God-experience he describes is of a God which defies definition. It seems to me that if he wants a God with an independent existence, then he is sliding back towards the theism which he claims is dead.

I get the impression that the 21 pages of this chapter contain his central thesis, and yet I can’t quite see the bit of firm ground on which he looks to build his new structure. It all looks like quicksand to me.

Richard Swinburne "The Existence of God"

I got this book out of the library last weekend - the second edition published in 2004. In it, Richard Swinburne spends about 350 pages going through the various arguments for God, and finds them persuasive.

Interestingly, Swinburne's definition of God is somewhat narrower than that provided by Dawkins in The God Delusion, and also narrower than Spong's definition of the Theistic God in A New Christianity for a New Age. I think it is worth making a direct comparison between them.

Here is the Dawkins version:

There exists a superhuman supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed the universe and everything in it, including us.

Here is Spong's understanding of a theistic God:

A being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will.

Note that there is some difference here. Dawkins' definition encompasses the non-interfering God of deism as well as the activist God of theism, while Spong is specifically describing a theistic God. Spong isn't making explicit Dawkins' claim that God created the universe, but that doesn't matter a great deal. If God is outside the universe, then whether or not God created the universe, he must have come into existence separately from it, and therefore Dawkins' arguments against God apply with just the same force to Spong's definition as to his own.

Swinburne's version of the God proposition is this:

There exists necessarily a person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who necessarily is eternal, perfectly free, omnipotent, omniscient , perfectly good, and the creator of all things.

This seems to me to be a narrower definition than either Spong's or Dawkins'. Although Swinburne doesn't actually use the word "supernatural" in his definition, this can be inferred, since omniscience and omnipotence are both generally regarded as being supernatural properties. Swinburne and Dawkins agree in their definition being one of a God who is the creator of all things, but Swinburne adds "without a body", "perfectly free" and "perfectly good" to his definition, and makes the existence and properties of such a God both "necessary". What this means is that Swinburne's definition is a subset of Dawkins' definition - Swinburne's God meets all the critera of Dawkins' definition, and so all Dawkins' arguments are applicable to Swinburne's God. Since they reach opposite conclusions, one or other of them must be wrong.

Swinburne's definition is also a subset of Spong's. Spong makes no statement concerning the characteristics of "the divine will" but Swinburne talks of it being "perfectly good".

Interestingly, in the first chapter Swinburne accepts that there are no conclusive deductive arguments for or against God's existence that start from generally-accepted premisses. So he accepts that one can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. So he starts out by stating that he proposes to use inductive arguments, and explains at considerable length what he means by this and how he proposes to use them. By means of these inductive arguments (whose subject matter cover the usual range of topics I've written about before), he finds that the balance of probability greatly favours the existence of God.

I think there are some fundamental errors in Swinburne's approach, which result in his conclusions being invalid. It will take a good deal of detail to explain what those errors are, so I'm not going to go into them now. Instead, I intend to go though the book in the same level of detail as I'm covering Spong, but only after I have finished the Spong blog.

Visiting Edinburgh

I'm up in Edinburgh from 10-14 August, playing in some concerts on the Fringe. Come over to my Horn Thoughts blog for details of the concerts I'm playing in.

Any CiF Belief people or other readers who are going to be in the vicinity, it would be great to meet up for a drink and a chat, or even a meal and a chat. You'll be very welcome at the concerts as well!

If you would like to meet up, drop a comment here, or email me.

Back to Bishop Spong

With other things going on, I've been neglecting my series on Bishop Spong and his book, A New Christianity for a New World. Time to get back to it. Here is the next chapter.

In the next chapter of his book, Spong looks at the death of theism. Defining a theistic God as “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will”, he deals with the decline of belief in such a God, for which he sees both rational and emotional evidence.

The rational evidence is dealt with in a couple of pages, that our understanding of the world is so much greater than it was in past times that many things we used to believe were God’s work – disease as signs of God’s displeasure, or the weather as something controlled by God. We now know that these are natural processes unrelated to sin, and we realise that antibiotics work just as well on sinners as on saints!

He goes on at much greater length about what he calls the emotional data, by which he means signs of psychological dysfunction in the world. He takes a brisk canter through various of the evils of the world – addiction to caffeine, alcohol and tranquillizers, school shootings, terrorism, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing, in each case seeing in them an emotional and hysterical reaction to the loss of our theistic safety-blanket.

I’ve read too much history and too many of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science columns to be convinced by this. It sounds too much as if Spong has decided on his theory and is looking to find ways of making the facts fit it. Take one small example. According to Spong “Recent studies reveal that thirteen percent of the people in the United States are admitted alcoholics – a number that, if true, staggers the imagination since, undoubtedly many more people have alcohol problems than admit to them.” My antennae immediately twitch at that. What recent studies? What were the criteria for placing people in the category “admitted alcoholics”? Who conducted the studies? What was their methodology? Although Spong includes quite a few endnotes in his book, none of them reference this specific figure, so I have no way of knowing whether he has correctly interpreted the data, was exaggerating, or (more likely) was taken in by an exaggeration in a news report.

For each of the points that he regards as being evidence for his idea that loss of belief in a theistic God is causing uncertainty manifesting itself in various kinds of psychological disturbance, I can think of at least two or three other probably greater contributing factors. That’s not to say that Spong is necessarily wrong in seeing a significant connection between all these things and the decline of theistic belief, though I think it his ideas are somewhat implausible. But it would take quite a lot of detailed study to find out, research that has not been undertaken. For instance, widespread dependence on prescription tranquillisers is to a certain extent a specifically American problem, to which the direct marketing of prescription drugs to consumers (banned in the UK and much of Europe) and the medicalisation of many conditions previously regarded as being within the range of normal experience have both made large contributions. That doesn’t make the situation any healthier, but an incorrect diagnosis of the cause can lead to inappropriate actions in pursuit of a cure.

To a certain extent, this doesn’t matter. Spong has diagnosed the decline and fall of theism, and in my view that diagnosis is reliably correct on the rational evidence alone. The problem is that the symptoms of the loss of theism are linked to his next chapter on the rise of theism. More on that another time.

Evidence claimed for God's existence

So now, I've been through all the major classes of reasons offered to me by Christians of my acquaintance as to why I should believe in God

It's worth going through a brief recap.

In Is religious belief rational? I discussed biblical inerrancy, and claims generally that the Bible is of and by itself sufficient evidence for God.

I also addressed the Argument from Numbers, the claim that the existence of lots of believers is evidence of the truth of their beliefs.

In More arguments for God I went through various "origins" arguments: the argument from first causes, and both the biological and cosmological versions of the argument from design.

In Miracles great and small I looked at Biblical miracles, "medical miracles", long-odds coincidences (which I call "Little miracles"), the claim that science hasn't explained everything so you can't disprove God, and the concept of the Unfalsifiable God. (To fit all these into a single article, I had to scamer rather quickly through those concepts. I would have liked to do a whole article on each of those topics, I think that they could have stood it, but CiF Belief weren't keen on commissioning what would have become a long series had I done so.)

In Moral arguments for God I moved into territory which has been discussed lately in terms of "Belief in Belief": that people behave better when they believe, that Christians are leaders in understanding morality, and that without a divine law-giver we wouldn't have a sense of morality. The first two of these are arguments for the desirability of God's existence, not for the truth of it. The third is undermined by the fact that we have evolved as social animals, and so our emotions and sense of morality has evolved to offer reasons to co-operate with each other, and this is an explanation that does not require God.

Then in Personal Experiences of God I dealt with mystical experiences and why they are not persuasive.

I think this covers pretty much the full field of arguments commonly put forward in favour of God. The comments in the various articles didn't bring up any really significant new twists.

Right at the start of this series, in The cosmic detective, I wrote:

In the absence of anything better, it seems to me that the scientific approach is the best available way of tackling the question of the existence and characteristics of the theistic God. But it could be argued that God's characteristics are so important to us that even science is not good enough for the job. If you think that, then you need to decide what alternative approach to use instead, and to justify why it is superior.

And this is the key issue. None of the "evidence" offered remotely passes muster by scientific standards. Either it contains logical fallacies, or it involves "cherry-picking" favourable evidence while ignoring or suppressing unfavourable evidence, or it involves a retreat into untestable propositions. No serious attempt was even made by those commenting in favour of belief in God to address the issues in a scientific way. But also nobody has made any serious attempt to suggest that a scientific approach is inappropriate and some other method is superior for the purpose.

In the first article HappyClappy made some attempt at doing so, but that amounted either to going on an Alpha course (Adam Rutherford is in the process of describing the detailed shortcomings of that approach) or observing whether theists behave better after conversion. It is certainly possible to study that, but all that would provide would be evidence of the effect of believing, not evidence of the truth of the beliefs.