Spong's Theses [Must Christianity Change or Die? A response to Bishop Spong]

MUST CHRISTIANITY CHANGE OR DIE?
A RESPONSE TO BISHOP SPONG
BY
THE REV. LEANDER S. HARDING, PH.D.

The first of Bishop Spong’s Theses that we will take up is thesis number 1: Theism, as a way of defining God is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.

Theism is the belief that there is a God who is distinct from and not dependent on the cosmos. Christian Theism is the belief that this God has revealed himself in creation and history and perfectly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ who has taught us to call this God,” Our Father.” In order to understand more clearly what John Spong means by his theses I have consulted his book, Must Christianity Change or Die? Harper Collins, 1998

Spong believes that the God described by traditional theism is the product of a pre-scientific, primitive, patriarchal culture and that as a completely culturally determined by-product of a passe world view should be and is rejected by contemporary people. In the world of Newton and Einstein and Darwin it is impossible to believe in the God described both in traditional theology and in the Western Philosophical tradition. The God of Theism is Spong says, “personal, external, supernatural and potentially invasive being. This God Spong describes contemptuously as the external, super parent in the sky.” (p.46) Spong particularly objects to the idea that God is distinct form the world and can intervene in history. He seems to think that any intervention by an independent God into the affairs of humanity would be by definition arbitrary and capricious. As an alternative to the God of Theism Spong develops the ideas of the late Paul Tillich. God is the innermost depth of things, the Ground of Being. God is not the highest person imaginable but that dynamic at the heart of all things which calls us forth into personhood. God is that which calls us into life and love. The right question about God is not who is God, which Spong thinks a dangerous question because it leads automatically to anthropromorphism, but what is God. God is the source of that ineffable experience of presence to which all the great mystics attest. This presence at the heart of things is the source of life, love and personhood. We can never achieve more than an imperfect knowledge of God but we can honor this spiritual dimension of reality by being, “all that we can be” and by helping others be all they can be. Self-fufillment is thus the ultimate form of the spiritual life.

I hope this is a fair if necessarily brief summary of what John Spong has to say about Theism. I think that the bishop has missed one of the gravest challenges to contemporary to theistic belief in our time and that is the division of the world into a world of public facts arrived at by the use of ‘objective” standards of investigation and a private world of beliefs and values in which there are no objective standards of truth. G.K. Chesterton said that when people stop believing in God it isn’t that they won’t believe anything but that they begin to believe everything. I am not sure that Spong’s reading of the culture is entirely au courrant. I also disagree with his understanding of the theological significance of some current trends in science. The quantum universe of chaos theory is far more friendly to traditional theism than the Newtonian world view. Spong often caricatures the tradition as when he accuses classical theism of gross anthropromophism i.e. that it teaches God as a super parent in the sky. This is just plain inaccurate. For example the principle of analogy, that God is always both like and unlike any analogy, a human father for example, is a principle of theology made famous by St. Thomas. (God as the Ground of Being is also from St. Thomas and given a famous contemporary interpretation by Tillich and I believe misread by Spong in such a way as to turn God into, as my systematics professor, Joop Van Beek used to say, “God the good and kind gas. “)

Bishop Spong’s conclusions do follow from his assumptions and from his way of doing theology. It may be that the greatest service of this book is that it makes explicit the implicit conclusions of some popular contemporary assumptions about God and religion and of a way of approaching the question of God.

Bishop Spong notices the power of world view. Every culture has assumption about the nature of reality that are not proved but assumed to be self-evident. Many aspects of a culture’s understanding of ultimate reality, meaning and morality flow from these uncritically held assumptions. The world view of the Bible is different from the world view of contemporary secular culture. So far, so good. All belief systems proceed from fundamental assumptions and we can not escape basing our thinking about anything, including God, on first principles which we can not get behind. Modern experimental science proceeds on the assumption that the universe is intelligible and the human mind can discern its order. (I think it can be shown that this is an idea that is dependent on a theistic world view but that is another issue.) Science can’t get behind this first principle. Spong acts as though this problem only affects the world view of ancients and does not affect his own. If you argue that the view of God proposed by the Bible is merely the epiphenomenon of culture, then what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander, your own view of God must be held suspect as being no more than the epiphenomenon of culture. If you would live by the sword of cultural relativism, you must be willing to die by the sword of cultural relativism.

Spong seems to assume that world views evolve by some automatic process from less adequate to more adequate and that the trustworthiness of a world view can be established by establishing it date. With world views newer is necessarily better. It is hard to see why a world view which is marked by a reductionistic materialism and radical moral relativism is inherently superior to the world view of the Bible with its sense of the reality of the supernatural and of moral absolutes. We are entitled to be suspicious, by the bishop’s own lights, if a person deeply imbued with the values of a self-indulgent culture proposes to us a vague God whose message, to the extent that it can be deciphered, is, “be all you can be.”

The bishop overestimates the problem of cultural conditioning with regard to the image of God in the Bible and underestimates this problem with regard to his own proposal. He seems particularly unaware of the way his assumptions influence his understanding of revelation and his choice of sources and method in thinking about God. Spong seems committed to a rather unscientific understanding of the laws of science. The scientist would say that so called “laws of nature” are summary and descriptive and open to revision by continuing experimental investigation. Spong seems to think that such laws are prescriptive and describe not only what has happened to this date but all that possibly could happen. By definition nothing can ever happen which is not inherent in the normal processes of nature. If there is a God, God is constrained by these laws of nature and is so identified with the processes of nature as to be indistinguishable from the God of pantheism. God can only affect the world by the outworking of the natural process. This leads Spong to a kind of divinizing of the process of biological evolution and a poignant faith in inevitable progress that is belied by 20th century history. Spong’s world view begins to look a lot like 19th century Deism. The Deists saw God as a great watchmaker who had wound up the mechanism of the universe but could not intervene in the machine once it had been set in motion. Within such a world view the miraculous and the revelatory, anything which speaks in this world of another world is impossible by definition.

The important thing is to note that the antipathy to the supernatural, to the miraculous, to the appearance within the realm of nature of something which speaks of another world, another reality, all of this is an assumption not a conclusion. It is the place where this line of reasoning starts and it can finish in no other place than where it starts. This anti-supernatural bias is what philosophers call an a priori, something taken for granted, from the first. If you have an anti-supernatural, anti-miraculous a priori, you rule out miracles, the supernatural and a God who, as Spong says, intervenes from the beginning before any investigation, before any consideration of evidence. Anti-supernaturalism is not enlightened. It is exactly a prejudice, a conclusion reached before a fair consideration of the case.

With this world view, with these assumptions, with this a priori, there can be no such thing as revelation, as God’s self-disclosure. Within such a world view it makes no sense to speak of the Word of God. There is no such thing as an authoritative Word of God. If we can not give up the quest for God where will we look for God? We will look at the outworking of natural laws and processes and we will look to our spiritual and religious experience. Our interest in the Bible will not be in the Word of God but in the Bible as the record of the religious experience of others. Our gaze is directed not to almighty God but to ourselves and our own inner experience. The image of God that emerges will look suspiciously like the person who looks back at us in the mirror in the morning. Our theology, if we can give it that name, will be a romanticization of nature and instinct with lots of capital letters, like Being, Life, Love. The whole spectacle will chill the soul of anyone with enough historical memory to recall the transformation of liberal German Protestantism into the Volksreligion of Hitler. Spong pursues to their logical conclusions assumptions, sources and methods that are the common denominator of a great deal of contemporary religious thinking. He does us a service by showing us ahead of time the destination of this train of thought. To borrow a refrain from a Gospel song, this train ain’t bound for glory and if you want to get on there is no need to get holy.

Let us oppose to these assumptions another set of assumptions. There is a God who is wholly other and completely distinct from the creation, a God who does not need the creation but who creates eternally and continuously in sheer, gratuitous love. A God who, though above and beyond human understanding, wants to be known to the fullest extent possible and to have real and intimate fellowship with human beings. Such a God, just because He is a God of love, will work to bring human beings into friendship and fellowship with God. Such a God does not will to remain obscure. It will be the nature of such a God to intervene in our affairs with saving love. Such a God will reveal Himself to humanity. Such a God will speak. We assume that such a God has spoken in and through the words of the Bible and that such a God continues to speak to us in and through the words of the Bible. We assume that such God has called a people to Himself to be a light to the nations, so that all people may know and have intimate fellowship with God. We assume that this God who speaks continuously a word of love, in the fullness of time speaks this word perfectly in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Bible recognizes Bishop Spong’s point about the hiddeness of God, even the necessary hiddeness of God. St. John says,”No one has ever seen God; but God’s only Son, he who is nearest to the Father’s heart, he has made him known.”(John1:18)

If we assume that there is a God of Love who seeks ceaselessly to communicate that love, we will expect a definitive, authoritative word from that God and we will look to the Bible as our source in doing theology. We will be interested not so much in experience as God’s self-disclosure in the supernatural Word of God which breaks into our world with words of judgment and grace. We will look to the Word made flesh first and foremost and our theology will proceed on the assumption that God is like Christ and that in Him(as Karl Barth says) there is no unchristlikeness at all. Our hope will not be in the self-fufillment of merely natural potentials but that the God of grace will transform us with His supernatural love until we have grown up into the fullness of Christ, until we are changed from glory unto glory. This train is bound for glory and if you want to get on you have to get holy.

The vision I have outlined flows as reasonably and self-consistently from its assumptions, sources and methods as Spong’s. The question is, when thinking about God; what are your assumptions, what are your sources and what are your methods. Which of these world views is most adequate to understanding the human situation and answering the deepest yearnings of the human heart? Which do you want to bet your life on? Which is most capable of sustaining a just moral order? Which of these visions can best sustain us in the face of the struggle with evil? Which vision will lead you to write hymns, create beauty and sacrifice self for the sake of others? Which of these visions most naturally gives rise to saintliness? Which of these visions do you want to bequeath to the next generation?

The second thesis of John Spong we are taking up in this series is the third in his manifesto: The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.

Spong treats the concept of the fall and the story of Adam and Eve in a chapter in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, entitled, “Jesus As Rescuer: An Image That Has To Go.” He quite accurately outlines the traditional story of salvation history which begins with a good and loving God freely creating a good creation and as the pinnacle of that creation God creates the man and the woman in his image and likeness. God places the man and the woman in the garden and gives them dominion over the earth. Then the snake appears on the scene and tempts Adam and Eve to break the one commandment that God has given them. Sin enters in and the original relationship with God is broken. From this original sin evil spreads. Traditional theology says that we are all affected by Original Sin and stand in need of an antidote for this sin. God deals with sin and evil by calling Abraham and by giving the law through Moses, by sending the prophets and in the fullness of time, Christ to be the sacrifice for sin. By his death and resurrection Jesus Christ restores our fellowship with God and gives us the gift of eternal life. This basic narrative of salvation Spong calls “Jesus the divine rescuer” which is “dead wood of the past” which “must be cleared out so that new life has a chance to grow.”

There are obvious problems with a literalistic reading of Genesis. My own way of saying this is that the story in Genesis is not about geology or paleontology but about theology and anthropology. It is an inspired story that tells us something about human nature, the nature of God and the relationship between God and humanity and about cosmology in the sense of the purpose of the world. Spong is quite explicit in rejecting such a theological reading of Genesis. He rejects the very concept of sin, which he understands as a fall from an original perfection. There was not an original perfection from which to fall. Indeed according to Spong it is meaningless to speak of the creation as good. The cosmos is not fallen. It is imperfect and evolving. Human beings are not sinful they are incomplete. Our lack of wholeness represents our struggle to become our “deepest and truest selves.” when we get caught in a struggle for survival, “our highest instincts collapse” and “our radical self-centeredness causes us to engage in a tooth and claw struggle all over again.” We struggle with the baggage of evolution. Spong is particularly offended by the way he believes the doctrine of Original Sin has been used to demonize sexual instinct and to control people with guilt and shame. Spong also questions the idea that human life has a unique and eternal significance. All religious systems may err in overemphasizing the significance of the human. Life, (with a capital L), may be able to go on quite well without us. For Spong, exaggerated feelings of guilt are not appropriate for an insignificant species engaged in a simple struggle to be, “our truest and best selves,” and deal with, “the baggage of evolution.”

Spong uses the terms “Darwin, Darwinism and evolution” interchangeably without really defining what he means by these. He seems to not recognize hotly debated questions about the boundary between scientific theory and philosophical speculation. Spong also seems to take for granted that a recognition of the vast time and intricate process involved in the appearance of human life argue against a special creation of the world and humanity by a loving God. John Polkinghorne, the physicist turned priest, writes of how secular minded scientists looking at the long chain of improbable events that are required for the appearance, first of life, and then human life raise the question of intelligent design under the title of the “anthropic principle.” For many close students of the evolutionary process, the process seems to beg the question of design and a creation by a creator. I have recently been given a book by Michael J. Denton, a Senior Research Fellow in Human Molecular Genetics at a New Zealand University with the title, Nature’s Destiny: How The Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose In the Universe. It is certainly overreaching to present this question as decided and closed within learned discourse.

There is a further problem with Spong’s approach to evolution. He assumes that the process suggests its own meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose are categories which depend on revelation. If you knew nothing of time, the most detailed description of the working of a watch would never disclose to you its purpose. When the watchmaker tells you the purpose of the machine then it all makes sense. You can see at once what the numerals and the hands are for or why the digital numerals change in the sequence in which they do. Arguments from design are of this sort. They argue that the notion of a creator gives a credible meaning to careful observation. Concepts like “our truest and deepest selves,” or our, “higher instincts,” are categories of purpose and meaning which are brought in from elsewhere. They are ideas which depend on an understanding of what it means to be human that takes human dignity and significance for granted. They are really borrowed without annotation from the tradition of Christian humanism. An automatic evolution which progresses without divine guidance and which naturally evolves the standards and values for a truly human life is as much a myth as Genesis and one which is a less credible explanation of purpose and meaning. The purpose and meaning of human life can never be discovered by the investigation of natural processes alone. Purpose and meaning by their nature must be disclosed. They must be revealed. Without a doctrine of revelation we are locked in a meaningless universe. Spong has no credible doctrine of revelation. This is the main rock upon which Spong’s argument becomes shipwreck.

Spong’s rhetoric is not only anti-Christian it is anti-human. It says that we are not yet human. We are only on our way to being human. Humanity lies off in some distant evolutionary future. In the present we are imperfect and incomplete beings struggling against a powerful instinct for self-preservation at any cost with fragile higher powers. Our higher consciousness is just beginning to emerge. It is hard to make out why Spong thinks the higher instincts valuable. What if they have no survival value? This was exactly the basis of the Nazi repudiation of the Christian value of compassion. It made people and the nation weak. Should not life belong to the strong? It is hard to see how you avoid falling into fascism with this kind of thinking about evolution. With this ideology you will be very tempted to sanction the unevolved for the benefit of the more evolved. Why should less developed life forms hold back the evolutionary process? If humanity lies in an evolutionary future, won’t you also be tempted to eugenics, to hurry along the process by selective breeding? This line of reasoning about human nature poses as liberal and humane but is in reality proto-fascist. It is to trade a story which has love as its fundamental value for a story which has power for its fundamental value.

Another irony of Spong’s argument is that after complaining, I think unjustly, of the way in which sexual instinct is made sinful in traditional theology, he ends by locating the source of evil in the body. Evil and sin are located in the lower instincts and human goodness is a matter of the higher consciousness. This is a view of human nature which is very similar to the Greek view that matter and the body is evil and mind and spirit are good. The view of traditional Christian theology which is based on the biblical narrative is I believe more profound and offers a more profound appreciation of what it means to be human. We have been made good by a loving God. On this view the body in its entirety including sexual instinct is inherently good. Human nature in its entirety is inherently good. Into God’s good creation comes the spoiler, the evil one. Satan is a rebellious spirit who according to Milton “would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.” This figure of the devil is very important and Spong passes over it in his retelling of the biblical story. The figure of the devil says that evil does not start with us. We are tempted to evil. We fall for evil and now a world in which people have fallen for evil is the only world we can be born into.

As a result of the fall all of human nature is affected. Our higher instincts are as much a problem to us as our lower instincts. Pride, vanity, Greed and lust for power are sins which involve our highest capacities. It is human beings who are the product of a high civilization who are capable of germ warfare and atomic weapons and genocide. Body is not necessarily bad and mind and spirit good. It is more complicated than that. The fall is a compelling account of the human problem. We are not in a struggle with our lower instincts but with sin which has its source in a powerful otherworldly evil. If we do not take the otherworldly character of evil seriously we underestimate our need to rely on God in the fight against evil. We also tend to demonize either some aspect of the body or some group of people. The notion of the a fall which has its origin in a otherworldly tempter protects the dignity of human nature. We have solidarity with each other in original goodness and significance as creatures specially created by a loving God and we have solidarity in our fight against common enemies. We also know enough to look for the working of sin in all that tempts us toward lack of charity toward our fellows.

We inherently sense that we have betrayed our humanity and that the way we live is not the life we were meant for. We are less than we are meant to be, less than we can be. Guilt and shame can be artificially manipulated but that does not explain away the deep sense that we have of spoilt chances. Cranmer’s prayer for forgiveness of “our manifold sins and wickedness. . .the memory of them is grievous unto us and the burden of them is intolerable” more powerfully interprets our experience as individuals and as a race than talk of a struggle with “the baggage of evolution.” We know that to be human is to be responsible. We know we are not right with God and with each other and can not make ourselves right with God and with each other. God in Christ promises us not the victory of some part of human nature over some other part but that we will be transformed into the fullness and likeness of Christ. Human nature was made for eternal fellowship with God in a community of mutual love and service. Jesus as rescuer who takes away sin and conquers evil is good news because it answers the deepest cry of the human heart to be restored to the life for which we were made and from which we have fallen away. The biblical story of creation, fall and redemption is a more powerful and realistic vision of human promise and peril than Spong’s watered down religion of inevitable progress.

Postscript On The Cosmic Fall
The traditional reading of Genesis also tells us that the creation is a fallen creation. The life of nature bears witness to being the creation of a good God but it too bears marks of being distorted by the power of evil. There is much cruelty and gratuitous suffering in nature. The traditional doctrine says to us that it was not meant to be so. As beautiful as nature is it shall be more beautiful yet. Part of the promise of Christian Doctrine is that in the Resurrection of the Body nature itself shall be raised. St. Paul says in the ninth chapter of Romans, that “the whole creation groans in travail as if in the pangs of childbirth” “For the created universe waits with eager expectation for God’s children to be revealed.” Taking the cosmic fall seriously gives us a powerful motive for fighting illnesses like cancer. They are not part of the plan and will be excluded from God’s eternity. This vision also allows us to protest against cruelty to animals, to protect the weak and resist the temptation to assume that just because something is “natural” it is good. It is hard to see how on the basis of Spong’s religion of evolution you could develop a similarly robust ethic of life.

The third of Bishop Spong’s theses that we are taking up in this series includes number 2 and number 4 in his manifesto. His second thesis is:Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt. Thesis number 4 is: The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ’s divinity, as traditional understood, impossible.

There are times when the whole purpose of John Spong’s reworking of traditional Christian belief seems to be to deny God any existence apart from the world and to keep such an “external God” from intervening in the world. This strikes me as such an obsession in his thought as to point to some kind of unhealthy fixation. What did the unexpected father do when he finally came home to the young Spong that was so awful that the adult has to create a universe in which there is no God who might ever visit his people? John Spong plucks at the anthropomorphic mote in the eye of first century Christianity while ignoring the self-narrating beam in his own eye. The essence of Spong’s critique of the traditional doctrine of the Incarnation, that Jesus Christ was truly God and truly man, is that this doctrine is a first century interpretation of the “Jesus experience.” St. Paul and the gospel writers did the best they could to interpret the unique Jesus experience but they were hindered by their inadequate first century categories and especially by the need to think of God theistically. Contemporary thinkers are better situated to understand the real significance of Jesus and to interpret that experience in the more adequate and expansive categories of late 20th century thought. But put simply and without the plausible sounding patter of intellectualized jargon this is the same claim made by Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy and countless challengers to Apostolic faith through the ages. This claim says in so many words,” The original New Testament Witnesses did not really understand and rightly interpret the significance of Jesus, I (Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, John Spong or fill in the blank) have a new insight which brings to light the heretofore real but unknown significance of Jesus.” So Mrs Eddy calls her book Science and Health, With Key to the Scriptures.

That people who are nearer to the events and had personal contact with Jesus and with those of his circle, that shared in the world view and thought forms that were most familiar to our Lord should have gotten it all wrong and that we should be in the first generation to get it right, beggars credulity far more than Jonah’s stay in the belly of the whale. In his presentation of the significance of Jesus we are moving in a realm where we are presented with a choice between the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the Gospel according to Spong.

Spong’s rejection of the Virgin Birth is by now familiar. It could not have happened because it would involve an external God and a miracle. There is neither an external God nor miracles. Therefore it could not be as reported. Mary must have been the victim of rape and Jesus an illegitimate child. No evidence is offered for this imaginative reconstruction of the biblical story. This imagined reconstruction is to be preferred to the account of the original witnesses since it must be true because it is non-miraculous. This is not scholarship. This is argument by assertion and circular reasoning. For Spong the doctrine of the Virgin Birth is first century people trying to express their Jesus experience.

Indeed it is an expression of the Jesus experience but Spong misses the central ingredient in this experience. Spong is also operating uncritically with a modern theory of religion. Religion in this model has to do with a private world of feelings, values and experiences and not with a public world of fact. This is the sense in which Spong uses the word experience and he therefore takes for granted that whatever else the Apostles are talking about they are not talking about something that could have occurred in the public world of facts. The experience of the Apostles was not some private interior reaction to Jesus but the conviction that in Jesus God had visited and redeemed his people. Jesus was Emmanuel, God with us. In Jesus the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and Mt Sinai, the God who delivered the people from slavery and led them into the promised land, the God who had promised a Messiah after the like of David, had finally come and lived a human life, died for his people and rose from the dead. God raised Jesus from the dead is the original preaching of the Apostles. The Apostles are not witnesses to an interiorized experience but a miraculous life, a redeeming death and an astounding resurrection. They are witnesses to the continuing presence of the risen Lord in their midst and to the miraculous power of his spirit poured out on his people. They are not trying to find adequate words for an elusive inner personal experience. They are giving witness to events of history, not of a spiritualized psychology. “We have seen it with out own eyes; we looked upon it, and felt it with our own hands; and it is of this we tell. Our theme is the word of life. This life was made visible; we have see it and bear our testimony; we here declare to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us.” (1 John:1-3.) Spong’s retelling of the biblical story bids us exchange events which he imagines may have occurred for events which are well attested to by otherwise trustworthy witnesses who often choose death rather than relinquish their witness.

Spong also makes much of the captivity of the New Testament and early church authors to the thought forms of their day. This misses the whole drama of the development of the doctrine of the Incarnation. What God has done in Jesus forces the Apostles and the early church fathers to completely rethink their ideas of God and humanity. Jesus was after all put to death for implying that he was the heaven sent “Son of Man.” He was killed for blasphemy, for outraging the conventional wisdom. This is why Saul of Tarsus persecuted the early church and sought to put Christians to death. Saul became Paul when a confrontation with the Son of God turned his life upside down. That “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” as St. Paul says is an astonishing thing for a good Jew to say. The Apostles and the early church struggle to come to this understanding but they are forced to it by the utterly miraculous quality of his life, by the power of his death and by the evidence of the resurrection. It takes over three hundred years to come to the definitions of the Council of Nicea just because the mighty act of God outstrips human thought and compels truly brilliant minds to run to catch up and develop categories which express and guard the unique event of God visiting his people by becoming a human being.

When Spong comes to his own recasting of the Incarnation he calls Jesus the “the spirit person” and a “God manifestation.” Spong takes us on a tour of biblical passages about the Holy Spirit in the Old and New Testament. What he makes of these is that the spirit has to do with life and vitality, with being fully alive, with”being all we can be.” An irony of this tour is that it is a way of using the bible that is very like the way fundamentalists use the bible for proof texting. For instance when Spong invokes the story of the valley of dry bones in the Book of Ezekiel as a story of the spirit giving life and vitality, he ignores the context of judgment and restoration. Israel has sinned and judgment has befallen Israel and disaster and destruction with the judgment. Yet God says to the prophet say that these bones shall live. The passage is not about mere vitality. The passage speaks about the spirit redeeming people from the consequence of sin. Spong completely ignores the close association between the spirit and the law in the Old Testament in developing his portrait of Jesus as “Spirit person.” We are left with a person who has a contagious life in him, an ill defined enthusiasm and vitality. Jesus then is a revelation of the nontheistic, nonpersonal Ground of Being. Jesus is not different from us in kind but only in degree. In him there was an unusual manifest ion of the God consciousness, the God presence. There is no reason in principle why you or I could not attain to the full human life revealed in Jesus. We need to get in touch with the ground of our being and cultivate the God presence in us. To be his disciple does not require assent to any creed. To be his disciple “requires me to be empowered by him to imitate the presence of God in him by living fully, by loving wastefully, and by having the courage to be all that God created me to be.”

Like most heresy Spong’s portrait of Jesus is not entirely wrong. It is true that there is a kind of life in him which reveals a new depth of human possibility. Surely the forgiveness that is in him is something really new. Surely he does reveal life and love. To be his disciple is to seek to be more like him. Spong’s Christ can not do what Spong wants him to do. He cannot for instance reveal love. Love is a personal category. Love is something offered from one person to another person. If it is a mistake to think of God as a person how can Christ reveal God as the source of love. In such a case the revealer with his costly sacrificial love must be greater than that which is revealed which is the non personal Ground of Being.

I have said before that Spong’s non-interventionist God is very like the God of nineteenth century Deism. Deism thought of God as the great watchmaker who wound up the mechanism of the universe but cannot now intervene in the running machine. Spong’s “nontheistic God” is similar except the watch is really self-winding since Spong is so insistent on foreclosing any independence between God and the world. A person who loves sacrificially with thoughtfulness and intention is surely a more admirable entity worthy of praise and adoration than a principle of life which cannot help its role as the engine of evolution. To talk of such a principle, such an abstraction as the source of love makes no sense. Love is personal and involves purpose and intention. Love speaks of giving. To give a gift is by its nature to intervene, to make a difference in another’s life by the gift of your own. If Jesus reveals the ground of love he must reveal a God who is personal. The personhood of God should be thought of as distinct from in both kind and quality of that of all other persons but God must be more not less than personal. That is exactly what the doctrine of the Trinity says; that the personhood of God is the only example of something which is three and one at the same time. It is a personhood which is utterly unique. The inner personal life of God is a life of giving and receiving love. Each person of the Trinity gives all he has to the other persons in such a way as to sustain the personal identity of the other. Everything that the Father has he gives to the Son and everything that the Son has he gives to the Father and the bond of Love that the Father and Son have with each other is the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity describes an eternal conversation of love and an eternal exchange of gifts, of self-donation. It is of the essence of this God to share life and love. The traditional doctrine of Creation is that this God created you and me in order to share with us this eternal life of love, to make us partners in the eternal divine conversation of love. That this desire to share the eternal Word of love with the creature would go so far as to totally identify with the creation by becoming incarnate and fully present in the creation in Jesus makes sense for a personal loving God. A God who is really a God of love would want to share love and life completely with humanity. Such a God would want to give himself to the fullest extent possible. Such a God would want to make a gift of God’s self. How may it be done? St. John says in the famous prologue of his Gospel that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The doctrine that Jesus was truly God and truly human is precisely what reveals God’s love. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to the end that all who believe in him should not die but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

A God who does not intervene, is a God who is indifferent and unresponsive, who is nonpersonal, nontheistic in Spong’s terms. It makes no sense to speak of such a God as a God of love. To be the “spirit person” of such a God or the “God manifestation” of such a God could do little more than encourage us to worship the vitalism of nature. (I must say again that history shows that when religious thought goes in this direction it is flirting with fascism.) Such a “God manifestation” could do little more than remind us of potentialities that we already have. Such a Christ could not give us what we do not have. We do not have love and righteousness. But the Incarnate Son of God does, the one who is God’s greatest and mightiest intervention and he says to us,”As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love. If you heed my commands, you will dwell in my love, as I have heeded my Father’s commands and dwell in his love.” (John 15:7-10) To be the God of Love is to be a God who intervenes. In Jesus Christ God intervenes in human affairs by making a gift of the eternal life of divine love to us. God makes us a gift of the very life of God. This intervention is courteous as Julian of Norwich says. It is of the nature of a gift and we can refuse the gift. To take the gift is to be changed by one who is wholly other and who descends to us that we might ascend to him.

Is the manifesto tow hich this refers online somewhere?

Yes.

Twelve Theses - John Shelby Spong
from "Here I Stand" ( HarperCollins; New York:2000 pp. 468 -469)
Drawn from my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile

A Call for a New Reformation

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. God can no longer be understood with credibility as a Being, supernatural in power, dwelling above the sky and prepared to invade human history periodically to enforce the divine will. So, most theological God-talk today is meaningless unless we find a new way to speak of God.

2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So, the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.

3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post--Darwinian nonsense.

4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes the divinity of Christ, as traditionally understood, impossible.

5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.

6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God that must be dismissed.

7. Resurrection is an action of God, who raised Jesus into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.

8. The story of the ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.

9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in Scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.

10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.

11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior-control mentality of reward and punishment. The church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.

12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for cither rejection or discrimination.

Author's Note: These theses posted for debate are inevitably stated in a negative manner. That is deliberate. Before one can hear what Christianity is one must create room for that bearing by clearing out the misconceptions of what Christianity is not. Why Christianity Must Change or Die is a manifesto calling the church to a new reformation. In that book I begin to sketch out a view of God beyond theism, an understanding of' the Christ as a God presence and a vision of the shape of both the church and its Liturgy for the future.

Spong was the handwriting on the wall, and I think at some level I knew it all along.

But for a long time, we could pretend that the Diocese of Newark had nothing to do with OUR local parish. But the rot spread from Spong and his ilk to General Convention, and thence down to the Diocese of Atlanta. The latest bishop is just about as heretical as Spong - we just couldn't stand it any more so we fled.

Where did you wind up? We were very "high" so we are with the Catholics - the Archdiocese of Atlanta is one of the most conservative in the country. We have a brand new (just a couple of weeks) archbishop (who will be confirming my eldest on Monday) He comes from the USCCB, but fortunately so far he seems to be very orthodox and quite strict (he follows an arch conservative that kept the liberals' bloomers perpetually in knots, and a good thing too!) The parish is all atwitter because the grapevine is reporting that he's actually going to catechize the children, and is coming an hour early for that purpose! The Christian Education director and our Parochial Vicar (who is in charge of the children's ministries) are sweating bullets and hoping their instruction was adequate!

My daughter actually wanted to take Confirmation instruction over again because she felt that she learned nothing in the Episcopal confirmation classes (I have to agree with her, it was all touchy-feely, kum-ba-yah nonsense.) She sure has learned a ton of stuff in THIS one - it was dead serious with lots of Bible study, recitation, memorization, and a three page paper on her confirmation saint and why she chose him. I think the Archbishop will be pleased.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.