John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, is an open, scholarly, and progressive Christian theologian who wrote 20 books and has gave lectures. Books 360 and 361 were gifts from the same friend.

Two quotes from the book’s back cover reveal more about Spong. First, he says: “I hold the Bible before my readers seeking boldly to free it from the clutches of a mindless literalism and, at the same time, presenting it as a dramatic and exciting document whose relevance for our day is both mighty and real.” Second, by Booklist: “[Spong} wants to bring [the Bible] into the twentieth century by focusing on its eternal truths rather than the historical, philosophical, and scientific aberrations that have caused some to discount it entirely … Spong offers interesting, well-thought-out ideas that should do what he intends – get people thinking about the Bible.” I feel that both quotes are accurate.

This back cover also has a very brief summary: “In this provocative bestseller, the outspoken and controversial Bishop John Shelby Spong reveals how literal interpretations of Scripture have been used to justify slavery, ban textbooks, deny the rights of gays and lesbians, subordinate women, and justify war and revenge. Spong combines current biblical scholarship, modern science, and, most of all, his deep love and respect for Scripture, to lift the Bible out of the prejudices and cultural biases of bygone eras. Eloquent, forthright, and compassionate, Spong liberates the Bible’s message of hope for all people.” I feel this quote is accurate (but I doubt if fundamentalists would dare read this book).

In Jan ’89, Spong and Jerry Falwell were guests on ABC’s “Good Morning America” and were interviewed by host Charles Gibson, who stretched their scheduled 5 minutes to 11.5 minutes. Based on the response from this interview, Spong proposed a debate with Falwell, but Falwell said no (which did not surprise Spong because he felt that “Jerry is not well equipped for such a debate”). But Spong later had 3 hours of debate with John Ackerberg on cable TV in the fall of 1989.

For Spong’s motivation in writing this book I quote four paragraphs from his Preface: “The response to these public media opportunities convinced both me and my publisher that a book on these issues would meet a very present need in the religious life of this nation and perhaps in the Western Christian world.

“There are many well written and even brilliant works of biblical scholarship available to the clergy, the scholars, and the academicians. There are many tracts, pamphlets, and books from the pens of fundamentalist Christians designed to defend biblical literacy and to shore up sagging weaknesses in the defensive armor of the literalists. There are, however, few volumes that take seriously the current level of biblical scholarship and make that scholarship available in an understandable form to the average person who sits in the pews of our churches or to that person who wants to be a Christian but who does not find in his or her church a sufficient reason to invest in that institution.

“Most Christians who are generally unaware of this scholarship seem to believe that they must be either a biblical literalist or admit that the Bible contains nothing of value for them. I am convinced that there is another alternative, that intelligence does not have to be a casualty of church life, that God can be worshipped with our minds, and even that biblical ignorance is unworthy of a disciple of Christ. It is my desire to place the biblical and theological debates that are commonplace among scholars at the disposal of the typical churchgoer.” This last paragraph refers to what has led a few members of my church to change from a fundamentalist church to our progressive United Methodist church.

I wished I had read this book when it came out in 1991. Nearly all that Spong says in this book about the deeper meanings of the Holy Scriptures is greatly insightful and inspiring, but it is mainly knowledge and wisdom that I had already learned from reading the works by many others whose views are progressive or who encourage a new emerging understanding of the Bible and Christian life. Had I read this book back then, I would have had another, very valuable guide for me to follow on my spiritual journey towards a deeper understanding that our unending spiritual journey must always aim.

In the first two (of 14) chapters Spong discusses fundamentalism and the human need for reality. He ‘tells it like it is’ when he reminds us that “A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices.” …“I could not believe that anyone who had read this book [the Bible] would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired inerrant word of God. Yet the claim continues to be made and continues to this day. Then Spong comes on quite strong: Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly uninformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naiveté?” To my mind he spent more words than are appropriate by asking such questions, which are not just rhetorical but I feel are sure to greatly anger ‘deeply insecure and fearful’ people. I think this is the wrong approach, but it may be that Spong’s very negative experiences with fundamentalists have shown him that a more gentle approach doesn’t work. But how does one encourage greater maturity to those with closed minds who have great fear of even reading progressive worldviews?

Ch 3 – The Pre-Scientific Assumptions of the Bible – state the obvious (at least to most Christians of today, and here I agree fully with every word I next quote): “When knowledge expands, it renders the interpretative framework of ancient people inadequate, and it reveals the ignorance of the past. For people living in one age to try to cling to the objective truthfulness of the concepts of another age is to participate in a doubtful enterprise.” He goes on to declare ‘the imperative to reinterpret’ and points out that: “Unless theological truth can be separated from pre-scientific understandings and rethought in ways consistent with our understanding of reality, the Christian faith will be reduced to one more ancient mythology that will take its place alongside the religions of Mount Olympus. Those who insist on biblical literalism thus become unwitting accomplices in bringing about the death of the Christianity they so deeply love.” …”We must think of God in the light of our perceptions of divinity. The Bible becomes not a literal road map to reality but a historic narrative of the journey our religious forbears made in the eternal human quest to understand life, the world, themselves, and God. We walk in their company as fellow pilgrims.” …”We have come to the dawning realization that God might not be separate from us but rather deep within us. The sense of God as the sum of all that is, plus ‘something more’, grows in acceptability. When theologians are pressed, however, to define this ‘something more’, the inadequacy of language becomes gallingly apparent. We modern Christians grapple with these ideas as we journey through our life in our time. On that journey, we read the Scriptures but not for their historic accuracy so much as to be able to receive and enter into the experience of those who journeyed before us. Like them, we explore the human capacity to discover meaning, community, and deity.”

If the preceding quotes resonate you, then you are very likely to want to read the remaining chapters, where Spong probes deeply into Scripture to seek their deeper meaning, keeping always in mind that the mindsets of the biblical authors were consistent with the time and place in which he lived and the audience to which he addressed his words. Ch 14 – Who Is Christ for Us? – and his brief Epilogue were my favorite parts, in which Spong summarizes the deep meanings he discovered and described so well in Ch 4 to 13. The following quote refers to Christian ideas developed in the centuries after Jesus’ death as well as to the audience of the Gospel writers: ”We tend to read the Bible through creedally formed Greek and Western eyes. Yet Mark would never had understood a word like ‘incarnation’. Paul quite obviously was not a trinitarian. Mark saw a cosmic struggle in the supernatural realm between demonic forces and the intervening God. Matthew saw a new and greater Moses fulfilling the expectations of the Hebrew Scriptures. Luke saw a new and greater Elijah reaching toward a universalism that would embrace gentiles as well as Jews. John saw Christ in terms of the preexistent deity who was Being itself, the great ‘I Am’. Each of these images participated in the truth of Christ. None of them bound Christ forever inside their images.”

I end this review from a subsection of Ch 14 John Shelby Spong called ‘What We Can Claim about Jesus’: “The experience of Jesus was an experience of love. This love was a powerful life-affirming reality. It was love that broke every human barrier and that swept over every human prejudice. It was love that would not be confined by the Jewish limits in which it was born.” …”Christianity becomes for me not an empty and outdated set of scriptural and creedal concepts but a new adventure in living as I walk side by side with the Christians of the ages who, with me, have journeyed into the meaning of God.” I give this book a very high recommendation. Few have stated so well the urgent need Spong addresses so well – to save Christianity from “the clutches of a mindless literalism” of fundamentalism. However, a weakness of this book is the lack of footnotes for the very many authors who have written (and in more detail) about nearly all of the many topics that Spong covers. He should have given credit where credit is due, so he gets only four stars because of this weakness.