Jesus for the non-religious
Subtitle: recovering the divine at the heart of the human
By: John Shelby Spong.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: HarperSanFrancisco
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9780060762070
Subjects: Jesus Christ -- Rationalistic interpretations; Jesus Christ -- Historicity; Jesus Christ -- Biography -- History and criticism; Jesus Christ -- History of doctrines; Jesus Christ; Bible. -- N.T. -- Gospels -- Controversial literature; Bible. -- N.T. -- Gospels -- Criticism, interpretation, etc
Description: 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, from the tale of Jesus' miraculous birth to the account of his cosmic ascension into the sky. He questions the historicity of the ideas that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, that he had twelve disciples, or that the miracle stories were ever meant to be descriptions of supernatural events. He also speaks directly to those critics of Christianity who call God a "delusion" and who describe how Christianity has become evil and destructive.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [301]-308) and index.