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HarperSanFrancisco
March 2007
On Sale: February 27, 2007
336 pages
ISBN: 0060762071
EAN: 9780060762070
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Religion
Writing from his prison cell in Nazi Germany in 1945
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian, sketched a
vision of what he called "religionless Christianity." In
this book, John Shelby Spong puts flesh onto the bare bones
of Bonhoeffer's radical thought. The result is a strikingly
new and different portrait of Jesus of Nazareth—a Jesus for
the non-religious. Spong challenges much of the traditional understanding that
has for so long surrounded the Jesus of history, from the
tale of his miraculous birth to a virgin, to the account of
his cosmic ascension into the sky at the end of his life.
Spong questions the historicity of the ideas that Jesus was
born in Bethlehem, that he had twelve disciples, and that
the miracle stories were meant to be descriptions of
supernatural events. He also speaks directly to those
contemporary critics of Christianity who call God a
"delusion" and who write letters to a "Christian nation" and
describe how Christianity has become evil and destructive. Spong invites his readers to look at Jesus through the lens
of both the Jewish scriptures and the liturgical life of the
first-century synagogue. Dismissing the dispute about Jesus'
nature that consumed the church's leadership for the first
500 years of Christian history as irrelevant, Spong proposes
a new way of understanding the divinity of Christ: as the
ultimate dimension of a fulfilled humanity. Traditional
Christians who still cling to dated concepts of the past
will not be comfortable with this book; however, skeptics of
the twenty-first century will not be quite so certain that
dismissing Jesus is the correct pathway to walk. Jesus for
the Non-Religious may be the book that finally brings the
pious and the secular into a meaningful dialogue, opening
the door to a living Christianity in the post-Christian world.
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