Hong Kong Liberal Religious Forum

ShariMiller of Denver, Colorado, writes:
Why is the current Catholic Church position on transsexualism so dreadful, so lacking in compassion?


Dear Shari,

The Catholic Church, like most religious bodies, is in an inner struggle between the values of yesterday and the rising consciousness of a changing world. Because that church is also autocratic and allows so little dissent, it is very difficult for them ever to change their thinking until new truth is so established in the world at large that their position becomes embarrassing. It was not until December of 1991 that the Vatican announced that they now believed that Galileo was correct. This was only 50 years after human beings had launched space explorations, which were based on Galileo's insights. Similarly this is why their stated opinions on birth control, the role of women and homosexuality are, as you say, so lacking in compassion and dreadful.

On the other hand their attitudes toward capital punishment, war and the need to care for the poor are sometimes far more advanced than what one finds in Protestant fundamentalism.

No one can fully escape the culture and ideas that form a particular age. The rise in human consciousness toward such things as war, the role of women and homosexuality is never implemented at once by all. It grows, beginning with a single protest, until it becomes a heresy, then a movement and finally a reformation. It then becomes a new orthodoxy equally resistant to change.

You serve the Church well when you raise uncomfortable questions. I hope you will continue to do so.

–John Shelby Spong

Charles Raines from Royal Oak, Michigan, writes:
I am curious about your thoughts on the intersection of Humanism with the teachings of Jesus. I consider myself a Christian, yet my spiritual path was altered by a brilliant Jewish Humanist rabbi who, in one of his Yom Kippur sermons, said something to the effect that if there is a "loving God," how could the Holocaust have happened? If there is a God of good, either "God" is impotent or callously arbitrary or else there is a co-equal God of evil.

You've spoken and written much about your feelings of the nature of "God." There may be no point in pursuing that again. Many of the teachings of Jesus, however, seem to me to be seriously humanistic in "philosophy." I've read the Wikipedia articles on Humanism (they go on and on) among other writings. I'm not suggesting that Jesus would be a Humanist (with a capital "H") by definition.

My point is that my "reading" on the notion of "eternal life" as a Jesus teaching (on which so very much of the Christian Church's dogma and distortion is based) is that if we love our enemies (we don't make war) and our neighbors (we feed them and keep them healthy) then we will not kill or starve, nor medically ignore our fellow humans. In short, our care of our fellow humans will perpetuate the species — human life will continue vs. our exterminating ourselves either by choice or neglect, i.e. "eternal life." An extension of that is humanity caring for our bio-system, our environment. The Church says it loves God's creation yet continues to be a loathsome laggard rather than a leader in environmental matters.

Stripping from Jesus' teachings the hocus-pocus of an intervening deity, I read about a humanist (lower case "H"). Your thoughts and feelings?


Dear Charles,

You raise a significant number of issues that need to be separated before I can respond to your questions and concerns.

First, humanism is not incompatible with the message of Jesus. Behind all our supernatural theology, there is the affirmation that in the humanity of Jesus, God is engaged.

Second, in his teaching he emphasizes that all religious rules are for the benefit of humanity or they are without value. The Sabbath was made for the enrichment of human life; he said, human life was not meant to be bound by the religious rules.

Third, Jesus teaching about the way to follow him was dedicated to humanity. You serve Christ when you feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked and visit the sick and those in prison.

Fourth, when John's gospel sums up the purpose of Jesus' life, it is that "they might have life and have it abundantly."

The way to experience the divine, I am convinced, is through the human. Transcendence is met in the midst of life. Eternity is engaged in the realm of the temporal. It is therefore a Christian imperative to live in the service of others even though that principle has been violated many times by institutional religion.

I cannot make that case fully in the format of the question and answer part of a column. It is far too complex. Let me simply state my conclusion. The way to eternity is to live fully now. The way to God is to love wastefully now. The way to engage the holy is to affirm being now.

I have no great confidence in the eternity of the human species. I do have confidence in the timeless power of love to transform the finite into the wonder of infinity. My next book is on this subject. In its 200-plus pages I hope to address your concerns more fully. It is now scheduled for a fall 2009 publication.

Thanks for writing.

–John Shelby Spong

PennyCarson of Peterborough, Ontario, writes:
I am a Sunday school teacher at the George Street United Church. Christmas is coming, and that means a Christmas pageant. If the material in the story of Jesus' birth is not history, then I don't know what to do about our children's Christmas pageant and still be true to this new understanding of the Jesus birth stories as myth. Would you give me some suggestions as to how I might handle this ? quickly? Christmas will soon be here.


Dear Penny,

Why is it that people think that something has to be historically accurate in order to be portrayed dramatically? No, of course it is not history that a star announced Jesus' birth. Stars were used to announce a number of historic births in the Jewish tradition, Isaac and Moses among them. It is not history that a star can wander across the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with it or that this star can actually stop over wherever the wise men are supposed to dismount. It is not history that Middle Eastern magi will follow a star to the birthplace of a new king of the Jews, who in fact is said to be the son of a carpenter. Neither do angels sing to hillside shepherds in the middle of the night to tell them about the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. Shepherds do not then go to find this child in a crowded village with no clues other than that the babe is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

That, however, is not what these narratives are about. The gospel writers knew that they were not writing history, they knew they were creating an interpretive portrait. That is also what you are doing when you present their portrait in a pageant. Why not then open the pageant with the words, "Once upon a time." Would that not signal that this is not history but like all great myths is still profoundly true and significantly important?

Perhaps you might also present a commentary to accompany the pageant. That commentary could then explain the sources on which the gospel writers were drawing for their details and thereby explain the meaning of these symbols. For example scholars know today that Matthew's story of the wise men and the gifts of gold and frankincense come out of Isaiah 60, where kings come to the brightness of God's rising, they come on camels and they bring gold and frankincense. The star in the East is lifted out of the Balaam and Balak story in Numbers 22-24. The manger/crib is a reference to Isaiah 1. The swaddling clothes come out of the Wisdom of Solomon and on and on we could go. A friend of mine who is a priest in the Church of England tried to write a contemporary version of the Christmas story but found it had little appeal to his audience. I do not think people respond to attempts to take the mystery out of an ancient tale. That does not mean, however, that they think the ancient tale is literally true or actually believable.

Perhaps we ought not to worry that for a few days each year people suspend their rational faculties and enter a world of magic where stars do wander and angels do sing and wise men do travel and virgins do conceive. There is enough time each year to deal with reality, maybe Christmas is the time for pretending. What is important is that we need to know that pretending is exactly what we are doing.

–John Shelby Spong

Margaret Rolfe from Australia, writes:
I would like to add to your ideas about the Christmas story expressed in the November 13 question and answer feature in your column. Yes, as you say, tell it as a "once upon a time" story, but tell it as a story with meanings: A story about hope (because all babies are about hope for the future); a story for ordinary people (because the angels appeared to shepherds); a story about a star (a symbol of light in a dark world); a story about wise men (the search for wisdom); a story about love (Mary and Joseph's love for their baby born in dubious and uncomfortable circumstances); a story about angels (if God is love, then angels are messengers of love); and a story, above all, about peace and goodwill on Earth! We all need that story. We all suspend belief when it comes to turtles racing hares, but we all can get the message.


Dear Margaret,

I like your ideas, so I will just pass them on to my readers. Maybe we will have some terrific Christmas pageants this year all around the world.

–John Shelby Spong

Evelyn Evans, via the Internet, writes:
I am an Anglican, but having accepted the concept of a non-theistic God, I feel uncomfortable attending church with all its outdated forms of worship. To leave the church, however, is to lose my "church family" and the human contact, as well as my part in the church's ministries, all essential to the expression of God's love. What shall I do?


Dear Evelyn,

I share your concern. I have in the course of my career attended churches with grand musicians and able choirs that use, without any obvious sense of being disconnected, a formal if slightly medieval liturgy. Frequently, its ordained leadership is all male and its leaders give no sense of being aware of the theological revolution raging in the Christian world, inaugurated early in the 19th century by such people as Hegel and Alfred North Whitehead. The liturgy followed on many Sundays reflects little more than a world that no longer exists. That liturgy still talks of God as "a being" who is external, presumably who lives above the sky, who desires to be flattered with our words of praise and who stands ready to judge.

These churches also seem unaware of the revolution in critical biblical studies that broke upon the Christian world almost 200 years ago. For example, their lay readers will frequently talk about the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians or to Timothy, neither of which Paul wrote. In sermons many clergy make the unconscious assumption that the gospels are history, that the wise men really followed the star and that Jesus really said all of the things attributed to him in the gospel. Adult education is almost non-existent in so many churches and where it is present it is mostly ineffective because the necessary time is never allotted, since liturgy (which is always the clergy favorite) not education is the priority. The only time real change can come to such churches is when there is a change in clergy leadership. Even then, real educational engagement is resisted since church has become for most people anything but a place to be challenged and to grow.

Clergy tend to be kind, loving and caring people, but many of them have been trained to assume that Christianity is still at the center of the world. It is not, however, the 13th century, though one would never guess that from the medieval sounds that confront many worshippers each week.

I will never abandon this institution, as dismal and boring as some of its manifestations are, because I believe change can only come from within and I must be part of the church to be able to participate in its transformation. That is, however, a vocation that hardly inspires in today's generation.

It would be a step forward if churches could just sing a hymn once in a while that was written later than the 19th century.

– John Shelby Spong

Rick, via the Internet, writes:
You mentioned that there are two sets of the Ten Commandments, and that one of them included the injunction against boiling a kid in its mother's milk. I believe you said this version was in Deuteronomy. But I looked up the Deuteronomy version, chapter 5, verses 6-21, and I find no reference to boiling. In fact this recitation of the Ten Commandments appears to be in complete agreement with the recitation in Exodus, chapter 20, verses 3-17. Would you please explain where I would find the Ten Commandments recitation that includes the boiling the kid reference you described? Thanks.


Dear Rick,

You must have misheard. I said there are three versions of the Ten Commandments. The oldest one is Exodus 34, the second is Exodus 20 and the last is Deuteronomy 5. It is in Exodus 34 that you will find the injunction about "boiling a kid in its mother's milk." This version is almost totally cultic.

If you look again at Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, you will discover that there is not "complete agreement" as you suggest. The primary difference is in the commandment about the Sabbath. Deuteronomy suggests that the Sabbath was to be observed because they had once been slaves in Egypt and even slaves must have a day of rest. In Exodus 20, the original Sabbath Day commandment has been edited to claim that God, resting from the work of creation on the Sabbath, was the reason for its continued observance. That addition to the original fourth commandment was from the quill of the priestly writers in the Babylonian exile (roughly from 596 to 450 BCE, depending on which return from exile was the last one), who also wrote the seven day creation story at the same time. That creation story did not exist when Deuteronomy was written. So the versions of the Ten Commandments are really four: the primitive Exodus 34 version from the "J" writer in the 10th century BCE; the familiar one from Exodus 20, which is originally from the "E" writer in the 9th century BCE but has been substantially edited by the "P" writer in the 6th century BCE; and the Deuteronomy 5 version, which is from the 7th century BCE and from the hand of the Deuteronomic writer. The biblical writers accounted for these several versions by suggesting that because Moses broke the tablets, God had to redo them and God did not redo them in the same way.

The fact is that these rules, like all covenant rules, emerged through the life of the nation of Israel and probably always had several versions. That is not a problem unless you are a fundamentalist.

– John Shelby Spong

IrvingLetto from Nova Scotia, Canada, writes:
If, as you have suggested, there was no literal empty tomb and the miracle stories do not describe events that actually happened in history, what was there about Jesus that so deeply captivated the first disciples? Is there something about the Jesus of history to which I can point today that anchors one as a Christian to see Jesus as an icon of faith?


Dear Irving,

Since I think that we can document that both the empty tomb story and the miracle stories included in the gospels are later additions to the Jesus story, your question actually carries us into the Jesus experience. It was the Jesus experience that caused people to see him as victorious over death and as the messianic figure around which the miracle stories gathered.

I see the primary Jesus experience as being that of a boundary breaker. His humanity and his consciousness seem to me to be so whole and so expanded that he was able to escape the basic human drive of survival that binds so many of us who are less fully developed. Unlike us, he appeared to need no security barrier behind which to hide. He could thus step across the boundaries of tribe, prejudice, guilt and even religion into a new dimension of what it means to be human and this is what caused people to experience God present in him. His call to us is therefore not to be religious but to be human and to be whole.

That is what every gospel symbol, from his miraculous birth to his empty tomb, is seeking to convey, so we read them as doorways into the meaning of God.

– John Shelby Spong

StephenArgent of Sussex, United Kingdom, writes:
Thank you for the stimulation of your published works and weekly newsletter. My question concerns the pastoral care of those Christians who do not have the intellectual capacity or strength of character to tolerate the ambiguity of your message. Rightly or wrongly their "simple" faith sustains them and many would be fatally undermined should they be confronted by doubts concerning such issues as the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection. Is it right to leave their views unchallenged, or should gentle sensitivity necessitate a less direct approach? I am aware that I will appear patronizing in posing this question, but from your own pastoral experience how have you dealt with this matter?


Dear Stephen,

Your question is a frequent one, but in my opinion it reveals things under the surface that I believe need to be faced.

First, is your concern really for those whose "simple" faith is being disturbed by developing knowledge? Frequently I find this question asked by one who is himself disturbed, but projects it on to others.

Second, are you really suggesting that truth should be compromised for the sake of those who might not be able to understand? Does that not make religion a bit of an opiate for the people?

Third, if truth is to be compromised in the realm of the church for the sake of those who might not understand or for those you call simple believers, has not the church become totalitarian? Is that not an example of control by giving people security when they cannot deal with truth? Is such a formula followed in any other discipline of human knowledge? Is religion somehow virtuous when it does what would be deplored in any other human arena?

Fourth, the pursuit of truth in religion is never imposed on people by force. That is not the nature of liberal education. The only people who seem to me to impose specific religious answers on anyone are those evangelical Protestants or conservative Catholics who believe that they possess the unchanging truth of God.

Fifth, the task of the Christian is to love "the least of these" our brothers and sisters. Seeking to protect them from uncomfortable truth is not just patronizing as your letter suggests, it is both demeaning and dehumanizing.

Finally, one of my professors once said, "Any God who can be killed ought to be killed." To which I would add, any faith that can be undermined should be undermined. A God or a faith that needs you or me to prop it up has already died long ago. You do not need to defend a living God. Only dead gods seem to require that.

– John Shelby Spong

Helen Goggin, Professor Emerita of Religious Education, Knox College, Toronto, writes:
I lead two study groups that have covered several of your books, and we are currently reading The Sins of Scripture. I would like to know about your new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. Both groups have expressed an interest in reading this book next, after we finish The Sins of Scripture in April. Both groups, mostly seniors, all life-long Christians and representing three denominations, have found The Sins of the Scripture fascinating, raising many questions and challenges. I think I've read all of your books, and I think this is your best. I have studied and taught theology for more than 40 years, but even I am learning things I did not know. Although I am mostly in complete agreement with your position (some of the group members are not so sure), it has been most exciting for me to see things in scripture I had not seen before. Or perhaps more accurately realized things are not there that I thought were.
Yesterday we were discussing the section on the Bible and Children. I was amazed at how little actual reference there is to hell, sin, guilt and punishment in the New Testament. All I could think of was the library at the college where I taught, which is filled with theological books about sin, salvation and redemption. You are making vast collections in theological libraries literally out of date. But as a process theologian I believe that every word that we utter is in a sense out of date by the time it s uttered as reality has changed in that split second. It was in process theology that I first met the ideas of a non-interventionist God and a Jesus who was human, albeit a very special human being. My faith journey has been a long, rich and very fruitful one, which I have tried to share as a religious educator with anyone who was interested. Thank you for the many years you have been doing the same in a much more public way. I just hope the church is listening, though as you point out from time to time it is a mixed reaction of relieved understanding for moving into the future and a fearful, defensive declaration of past beliefs. Thank you for saying we do not need to create the church of the future, just take steps toward helping that church to be a possibility. My little group yesterday found that very comforting.


Dear Professor Goggin,

Thank you for your letter. I am glad that your group has found The Sins of the Scripture helpful. Jesus for the Non-Religious came out in hardcover in September of 2007 and in paperback in the summer of 2008. It has had an interesting history.

For years I have sought to find a way to talk about the God Presence experienced in Jesus without using the language of traditional theology. That language lost its meaning for me when the understanding of God that I call "theism" lost its meaning. The theistic God forms the backbone of traditional theology. By "theism" I mean that view of God as a being, supernatural in power, external to life who invades life periodically in miraculous ways to accomplish the divine will or to answer prayers. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo expanded the universe to such dimensions that this theistic God became homeless. Isaac Newton described the mathematically precise ways in which the natural laws of the world operated and the theistic God became unemployed. Charles Darwin destroyed the boundary between the animal world and human beings and the theistic God became uninvolved.

Yet the God experience continued to be real, and the affirmation that lies at the heart of Christianity (that in some way God had been encountered in a new way in the person of Jesus) drove me to find a new language in which to talk about Jesus that preserved the integrity of the God experience in him. Jesus for the Non-Religious was the result. It was the culmination of about forty years of theological wrestling. This book therefore became my favorite of all my titles and remains in that position to this day. It will be interesting to see whether my book on Eternal Life, scheduled for publication late next summer, will supplant it.

My interpretative clue in Jesus for the Non-Religious was to look at Jesus as his disciples and the gospel writers did, through a Jewish lens, and to see at least the synoptic gospels as liturgical books produced in and influenced by the synagogue. From that perspective the "supernatural" elements looked very different.

We get to Toronto from time to time. I would love to meet you and your class some time.

My thanks,
John Shelby Spong

A minister in the Deep South (who asked to be kept anonymous) writes:
I struggle with reconciling my "personal" experience of God when I can no longer hold to a personal God. How do you, or would you, help a member of a congregation you are serving understand the dichotomy of progressive religion?


Dear Pastor,

Thank you for your question. I know the mindset of the state and community in which you live and work and I know the struggle that goes on in many clergy between their integrity and their desire not to offend the common wisdom of the world in which they live.

The first thing you need to do is to recognize that for most people religion is not a search for truth, but a search for security. Security is not well served by opening up questions for which there are no answers. You must begin by accepting people where they are. A good pastor, however, does not leave them there forever, for that means they will never grow.

I would avoid a frontal assault on religious ignorance from the pulpit. Remember that a sermon in church does not offer people time to process or space to disagree. They cannot talk back and so they must absorb, resist or close their minds.

There are other activities that do not have these shortcomings. Study groups, where the standard is that there is no such thing as a "dumb question," allow dialogue and growth to take place. A book study group allows the author of the book to be the one raising the issues and thus allows the minister to facilitate the discussion. In newsletters to their congregations I think clergy should write think pieces that invite dialogue and that say, "Tell me what you think of these ideas." People will actually read such pieces and they can be the means for opening up deep conversations and significant personal interaction.

Of course, when we say God is personal, we are not describing God; we are describing our experience of God. Since we are persons, we can receive the transcendent power of life, love and being only as "personal." There is nothing wrong with that. To move from these to a statement about what God's being actually is, however, is more than any of us should claim.

I have never known an honest and open theological attempt to probe the mystery of God to be destructive.

I wish you well in your ministry.

– John Shelby Spong

Lynda Beltz, from western Pennsylvania, writes:
Was Jesus also God? Or was he just a wonderful, inspired man more in touch with spiritual things than most other men?


Dear Lynda,

Unfortunately, the way you ask this question does not lend itself to a simple answer. I need to know what you mean by the word "God" and what you mean by an "inspired man." This confusion has been created by the Church itself out of a dualistic mindset that believed that God and human life, heaven and earth, souls and bodies, spirit and flesh were radically separate categories. That reflected an ancient mindset that is not part of our world view.

The Christian experience best articulated by St. Paul affirmed that "God was in Christ," that is, in the person of Jesus we met, engaged and interacted with the presence of God. Later when Christians tried to define how God, whom they thought lived above the sky, got into Jesus living on this earth, they had a problem. That is where you begin to get the explanations you find in the gospels.

Mark, the earliest gospel (ca. 70) said that at Jesus' baptism the heavens opened and the spirit of God entered him. The word you used, inspired, really means filled with the spirit.

When Matthew wrote (82-85) he introduced the Virgin Birth story that said God entered Jesus at conception. At that moment, Jesus' full humanity was compromised. Luke, writing a bit later (88-93), confirmed Matthew's Virgin Birth account, but with greatly varying details. John, writing at the end of the century (95-100), asserted that Jesus was "The Word of God" present as part of God at the dawn of creation, and that this "Word" was enfleshed in the fully human Jesus. It is of note that John totally omits the miraculous birth story.

I think most of this debate is irrelevant. I believe that God can dwell in all of us and that the experience of the early Christians was that God indwelt Jesus in a particularly full and complete way.

To say that "Jesus is God" in a simplistic way is absolute nonsense. Jesus prayed to God. Was he talking to himself? Jesus died. Can one say God dies?

I meet God in Jesus. I also meet God in people like you. The difference, I am convinced, is one of degree not one of kind.

–John Shelby Spong

Michael Neal Arnold of Santa Barbara, California, writes:
Your vision of a reformed Christianity is easy for me to embrace. However, I am concerned that this vision is not compatible with "The Church Catholic." Do you believe the dream of a unified church is a necessary casualty of the Reformed Church?


Dear Michael,

The first thing that I think you and everyone else must face is that there never has been a unified church. That is nothing less than ecclesiastical propaganda on the part of those who like to suggest that anyone disagreeing with their church today disagrees with a specific historic Christian tradition. What Christians refer to today as "orthodox Christianity" is a reference to that part of the Christian Church that actually won the battle for supremacy. Winning never means you were right, it means only that you were stronger. If you read the work of someone like Bart Ehrman, a University of North Carolina Religion Professor and New York Times best-selling author, the multiplicity of competing Christian groups in the early years of Christian history becomes very apparent. There was really no such thing as "early Christianity," as church polemicists use that phrase today. There were in fact "early Christianities." The battle to be able to define what orthodox Christianity consisted of was finally decided on the basis of political power. The Bishop of Rome turned the power of his location in that capital city of the known world into the ability to define Christianity and to limit the understanding of the past to his particular interpretation of the past. So we need to disabuse our minds of the idea that there ever was a unified Christianity to which we must now seek to return.

Second, we need to recognize that the New Testament never speaks of Christianity as a majority movement. The Fourth Gospel has Jesus pray that "they all may be one," which clearly implies that they were not one or the prayer would not have expressed this hope. The image of the relationship of the Church to the world in the gospels is never an image of Christianity dominating or ruling the world. Christianity is always portrayed as a minority movement, a remnant if you will. The New Testament expresses the idea that in the vast darkness of the world, the Christians are to be a lighted candle, in the soup of life the Christians are to be the salt, and in the lump of dough, the Christians are to be the leaven that makes the bread edible.

Our job as Christians is never to conquer or to dominate the world, but to give the world a new quality. That is all I seek to do today. I want to be a light shining in both the darkness of the world and of the church. I want to be the seasoning that makes the soup tasty or the leavening agent that causes the loaf to rise. History teaches me that the reformation of Christianity never comes from the dominant center of the church, but only from the marginalized edges. In this generation I watch a faithful church slowly emerging, but it is not yet and may well never be a majority movement. I listen in despair to Christian leaders who think they can bring unity by imposing propositional truth on all people, or to leaders who are willing to sacrifice truth in order to achieve unity. I believe that being faithful is always more important than being unified. This means that in the present struggle in my particular church, I would rather see my church divided than to see it united in homophobia, patriarchy or racism.

My best,
John Shelby Spong

Donna Kaplan asks:
I have a question about the scripture passage from St. John's Gospel that you quoted recently in one of your columns: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me (meaning Jesus)." What about the Jews?


Dear Donna,

There are several levels on which an answer to your question must be contemplated:

1. Did Jesus actually say these words? I doubt it. They appear in the Fourth Gospel, which was written 65-70 years after the death of Jesus. They are also part of a series of "I Am" sayings, which appear nowhere except in John and are regarded by most biblical scholars today as the words of the Christian community that have been placed onto the lips of Jesus. They are clearly not the words of the Jesus of history. The scholars in the Jesus Seminar regard nothing in the Fourth Gospel, not a single one of the sayings attributed to Jesus in that gospel, to be the authentic words of the Jesus of history.

2. Most of the Christians at the time that John's gospel was written were still Jews. The Jews who were the followers of Jesus had just been expelled from the Synagogue. The tensions between Revisionist Jews, who were also disciples of Jesus, and the Orthodox Jews who controlled the Temple are in the background of this gospel.

3. These words were certainly not meant to fuel an imperialistic missionary campaign to convert Jews and others as they were interpreted by later generations of Christians. The actual split between the Jews who were disciples of Jesus and the Orthodox Party of traditional Jews did not occur until almost 60 years after the crucifixion. That is, for the first 60 years of Christian history, Christianity was itself a Jewish movement within in the synagogue.

4. At this moment, I am reading Rudolf Bultmann's The Gospel of John: A Commentary. He argues, persuasively I believe, that John portrays Jesus as the logos enfleshed in human life, calling us all to a deeper sense of what it means to be whole and human. To come to the God present in Jesus for John was to discover the logos in each of us. That, argues Bultmann, is what Jesus represented to the people of his day. It was that discovery, not some form of doctrinal Christian belief or faith, that was for John the only doorway into the ultimate reality we call God. That is quite different from saying that only those that believe in what Christianity says about Jesus will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Recall that in Matthew's parable of the judgment (Mt. chapter 25), Jesus says the criterion for eternal life is not what you believe but how you respond to the presence of God in another human being, especially those regarded as the least of our brothers and sisters. In that parable neither the sheep nor the goats are ever asked what creed they say. They are asked "did you see and respond to the presence of God in another human being." It was the Epistle of John that states that if you cannot love your neighbor whom you have seen, how can you expect to love God whom you have not seen?

Those who quote John's gospel to validate their own exclusive religious prejudices simply have no idea what John's Gospel is about. This Gospel does not lend itself to proof texting. It is far too profound a work for that.