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John Shelby Spong: midwife to birth a new faith
Catholic New Times, May 4, 2003 by Ted Schmidt
There seems to be little subtlety about Bishop John Spong's attitude towards Christianity. Take his second last book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. And now the paperback of his last one has landed on my desk, A New Christianity for a New World, subtitled Why Traditional Faith is Dying and Plow a New Faith is Being Born (Harper Collins paperback 2003)
Spong, however, is an atypical radical. A tall, southern gentleman with courtly manners and a quiet demean-our, he still carries traces of his southern accent. The leading spokesman for liberal Christianity and recently retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, N.J., Jack Spong (as he introduced himself in CNT's office), literally lectures all over the world on the above themes. In Toronto for a series of lectures with Anglican congregations, the author weighed in on several topics contained in his book.
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Spong is the natural successor to his mentor, John Robinson, the British theologian whose 1965 book, Honest to God, rocked the Christian world. In a systematic manner, he adroitly picks up the threads of Robinson's attempt to remythologize Christianity. As he says in A New Christianity for a New World, "it is time to face the facts that the premodern biblical and creedal concepts communicate even less at the beginning of the 21st century than they did in Robinson's time." This peripatetic Anglican cleric has undoubtedly struck a chord with modern Christians increasingly uncomfortable with childish conceptions of God, New Age substitutions and "the hysterical revival of fundamentalist religions all over the world." Responses to his last two books have been as encouraging as his reception was in his packed addresses in Toronto the weekend of April 4-6.
A New Christianity for a New World elicited 10,000 letters and emails--75 per cent being positive. Ninety per cent of these were from laypeople who resonated with Spong's probes. The negative mail was equally revealing--90 per cent were from the ordained class. The familiar labels were trotted out as heretic, atheist, anti-Christ, deceiver, the devil incarnate.
Old formulae have little attraction for modernity
Spong is articulating the obvious. The old formulae have little purchasing power in a postmodern world. Scripture as literal, a virgin birth by which the divine nature of Christ has been guaranteed, the substitutionary view of Jesus saving death in payment to an angry deity and the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus, "I find each of these fundamentals as traditionally understood, to be not just naive, but eminently rejectable." This is where Spong begins and if truth be known, it is where most Catholic theologians not only begin, but have been for more than 30 years.
The author goes out of his way to repeat constantly that, "God is real and I live deeply and significantly as one related to that divine reality. I am a Christian believer, the reality of the God-experience overwhelms me daily."
However, while maintaining God's reality, Spong insists, "this God is not a supernatural entity who rides into time and space to rescue the distressed. This God is the source of life, the source of love, the Ground of Being." In other words, he wishes to take us beyond theism (the outsider God), but not beyond God. This is a new exploration into God (J.A.T. Robinson), which is potentially energizing and intellectually invigorating.
"It is fascinating to me that what we have done is to take a human definition of God and equate it with God. The tradition is dying--it may be already be dead--and the fear in established church circles is that because our human definition of God is dead, now maybe God may be de-ad. Theism assumes the earth is the centre of the Universe--God above the sky looking down from above, basically keeping record books and occasionally intervening in a supernatural way. The whole tradition has been told that way. And so the only option when you disagree is that of an atheist's. Well, the second commandment says we are not to make any images of God.
"We have assumed in Christianity that we could make images of God and those images are infallible. We've fought religious wars over those definitions, burned people at the stake under the guise that we have to have a clear definition of God of we won't know who is an insider or who is an outsider."
Spong then spoke of his intellectual heroes, Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo.
"And how we've moved further away from their theories to really appreciate the immensity of the universe--the 125 billion galaxies and a God above this? So far away? And then choosing this people and parting the Red Sea and drowning Egyptians? It's nonsensical. And then we get to Newton and natural law and this shrinks the arena in which 'miracle and magic can occur.' Was there ever an age of miracles of were we using language to explain what we did not understand?"
A Christology from below
After his insistence that to more beyond the theistic definition of God, is not to more beyond God, Spong tackled the role of Jesus. He rejects "the Jesus of supernatural entry into life through the miracle of the virgin birth ... and the exit from the world through the miracle of the cosmic ascension. It must be stressed that Spong rejects "the removal from Jesus of any divine claim," which he attributes to Robert Funk of the Jesus seminar. He asks the pertinent question: "What was there about Jesus' life that caused the theistic interpretations in the first place?" Spong goes to some length to insist again that "theism is but one definition of God and no definition of God is to be equated with God. I seek a Christology that preserves divinity but not supernatural theism ... I seek in Jesus a human being who makes known, visible and compelling the ground of all Being."
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