The Book of Acts opens with an account of a critical decision made by the new community of the people who accepted Jesus as Lord. The decision had to do with the necessary qualifications of the person selected to replace Judas. Plainly these people had no truck with the various personality inventories of that time. There is no deference to any standard for “I.Q.,” no required credit rating. Their only stipulation was, “One of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection” (Acts 1:21–22, RSV). As the record indicates, the apostles selected Matthias by the power of the Holy Spirit. In so doing, they placed an “indelible dimension” into all future Christian witness. So significant did the earliest Christians regard this “indelible dimension” that Paul, from whom the earliest New Testament account of the resurrection emanates, could declare, “If Christhas not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). It is about the reality and the power of this “indelible dimension” that Bishop John J. Spong writes so persuasively and so honestly in The Easter Moment.
Bishop Spong is one of those rare people that the Episcopal Church—complex and baffling as it sometimes is—spawns in the ranks of its ordained ministry, eventually blossoming brilliantly and ably in its House of Bishops. Robert Mackie of Scotland in a tribute to the late W. A. Visser’t Hooft, the World Council of Churches’ founding General Secretary, wrote, “He was a Christian with a lively mind who was prepared to do the hard work necessary for the realization of some of his dreams.” The Easter Moment, as do other of Bishop Spong’s books, lectures, and sermons, plainly indicates that the essence of such a tribute is applicable to him also.
Descriptive of Bishop Spong’s competence and resourcefulness also could be Dr. Vesser’t Hooft’s observation about Karl Barth, after being persuaded by a friend to read the second edition of Epistle to the Romans (1923): “I found it a terribly difficult book, but I did understand enough to become deeply impressed … here was a man who lived in the modern world, … a man who struggled with the problems of historical criticism and of modern philosophy—but who had rediscovered the authority of the word of God. This was a man who proclaimed the death of all the little comfortable gods and spoke again of the living God of the Bible” (The Christian Century, July 1985, p. 669).
In The Easter Moment, Bishop Spong deals with the resurrection event pastorally, sharing with readers theprofoundly moving and illuminating experience of ministering to and being ministered to by a friend, a young and able physician who was dying of a rare, incurable disease. Bishop Spong grapples with the resurrection event by examining the testimony of the earliest traditions that embrace it, treating the sources objectively in the mode of modern biblical criticism. He carefully assesses hypotheses associated with the empty tomb and the absence of a dead body. He refuses to be intimidated by the difficult questions. As author Spong observes, “The moment of Easter appears to be subjective at some points, objective at others, but essentially it is always beyond both categories” (p. 139). “Every description is inevitably a distortion, but that distortion does not mean that the event being described was not real. Easter was a ringing confirmation that beyond the limit of our eyes, or the touch of our hands, there was an eternal, timeless reality” (p. 168).
The burden of proof concerning the resurrection and its consequences is carried first by the conclusion that it is only to the “eyes of faith” that such reality embodied in The Easter Moment becomes convincing and therefore efficacious for human life. “That risen Christ was real. I cannot say that too emphatically. He was not resuscitated, he was resurrected. He was changed. It was not the limited physical eyes of our humanity that saw him, but eyes of faith newly opened by the power of his life” (p. 196). And second, the burden of proof is carried by the miraculous change that the reality of the resurrection wrought in the little band of despairing, fearful, disillusioned, hopeless post-Good Friday followers of Jesus, for it transformed theminto a formidable community of believers in the risen Christ whose total commitment “would start a movement that would transform the world” (p. 197).
John Elbridge Hines
Highlands, North Carolina
Presiding Bishop
The Episcopal Church
1964–1974