[Dialogue] 8/15/13, Spong: On Building a Christianity without Security or Creeds

Thu Aug 15 07:54:16 PDT 2013

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR

	On Building a Christianity without Security or Creeds

	One of my readers, Henry Gael Michaels, has shared with me an anonymous story on the meaning of God with which I open this column. It also reveals, I believe, what is wrong with all theology. I am grateful for this gift. This is his story.
	The mystic was back from the desert. “Tell us,” the people said, “What is God like?”
	The mystic wondered just how he could ever tell them what he had experienced in his heart while in the desert. Can God ever be put into words?
	He finally decided that in response he would give them a formula that was so convoluted and literally impossible, so inaccurate and so inadequate that their only choice would be to do as he had done and go into the desert to experience God for themselves.
	Alas, however, that is not what his hearers did. Instead they seized upon his formula, turning it into a sacred text or an infallible doctrine. Then they imposed it onto others as a creed or a set of holy beliefs. They even proclaimed that it was necessary to hold it, if one wants to be saved. They began to persecute and to kill those who would not consent to this formula. They went to enormous efforts and great costs to spread this formula to foreign lands. Some even gave their lives for this cause.
	The mystic was sad. “It might have been better,” he said, “if I had said nothing!”
	“Perhaps,” Henry Gael Michaels concluded in his letter to me, “This is why Jesus never wrote anything down.”
	It seems to me that this story articulates the problem that modern religious men and women have with organized religion and theology. Religion has adopted theological formulas based on two things: First, there is an experience of God, which people come to believe is both real and authentic, which makes them aware of transcendence. This experience is life changing, seemingly unrepeatable and certainly stretching to those having the experience. It leads to new dimensions of life and to new understandings. All religion, along with all theology, is born in such a primary experience.
	The second thing involved in religion and theology is, however, the compelling need to explain that experience to another. That is the moment when the experience is inevitably put into human words. The experience and the wordy explanation are never the same. If the experience is true, it is timeless, external and transformative! The explanation, however, is always time bound, time warped and finite. Every explanation freezes the experience in the vocabulary of the explainer. The explanation reflects the world view of the explainer, the explainer’s level of knowledge and the explainer’s time in history. There is no such thing as an eternal explanation. As time moves on, the destiny of every explanation is to become increasingly foreign to its audience, increasingly irrelevant to its time and finally to be dismissed or ignored as no longer appropriate to its world. If people begin to identify the experience with its explanation, the experience will die when the explanation dies. That is the law “of the Medes and the Persians,” and that is also the reality of human history. Now look at modern Christianity.
	Jesus was a first century experience in which people came to believe that they had encountered the transcendent reality that they called God. The New Testament was a first century attempt to explain that experience. There is no doubt that in the Jesus experience, lives were transformed. People, who at the time of Jesus’ arrest, had forsaken him and fled in fear, somehow came back together after his death and were empowered with a new courage. Previously fearful ones were now ready to die for the reality of an experience they could no longer deny. Even though these people had been raised inside a strict Jewish code, their “Jesus” experience forced them to expand that code so dramatically that the singularity of God was compromised and they could no longer see God apart from Jesus, nor could they see Jesus apart from God. Their understanding of God was thus modified and changed for ever. In time, this new understanding forced them to adopt a new holy day on which to celebrate this experience. That was when the first day of the week began to be observed and a new form of worship, based on the Passover meal, but expanded into something new that they called “The Eucharist,” came into being. That sacramental meal was said to mark the fact that Jesus “was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” The New Testament was thus the written attempt by the followers of Jesus to capture the power of their Jesus experience in words. Inevitably, they were the words of the first century.
	Can we keep our hold on their experiences by literalizing their words today? Of course not! We cannot twist our minds into first century pretzels and think of God in the same way that they did. God cannot be to a post-Galilean, post-Newtonian world a being who lives above the sky, and who once entered the earth by causing a baby to be conceived in the womb of a virgin. Our minds and hearts are not drawn to the picture of a miracle-worker, who possessed such supernatural power that he could expand the food supply, heal the sick, banish the demons of epilepsy and mental illnesses, and even transcend the limits of death before he returned to God’s heavenly home by ascending into the sky of a three-tiered universe to a realm from whence this Jesus supposedly had originally come. That explanation may have fit the world of the first century quite well. Today, however, that understanding of Jesus sounds strange, foreign, dated, and mythological. Space age people cannot imagine such a heavenly being. The explanation of the New Testament may well point to truth, but the first century words they had at their disposal, can never capture the reality of that experience for all time. Explanations no matter how ancient, revered or sacred always die. No explanation is timeless, not even the explanations contained in the gospels. None can, therefore, be eternal.
	By the time the fourth century arrived in Christian history, Christians began to turn their first century New Testament explanations into creeds that were couched in the words that reflected the common assumptions of fourth century Greek-speaking people. That world thought in terms of dualism. By this I mean that they saw a strict division between heaven and earth, between the human and the divine, between the body and the soul and even between the flesh and the spirit. Dualistic concepts therefore permeated the language of the fourth century creeds and began to shape Christian understanding. The word “Incarnation,” for example, which literally means “to enter the flesh of,” became a doctrine designed to explain the way Jesus was to be understood. Next, Jesus was transformed into being the second person of the Holy Trinity. The human Jesus began to fade from view and a religious system that neither Paul nor the gospel writers would have ever recognized came into being. It was this theological system that poured anti-Semitism into the blood stream of the Christian West, producing such things as the expulsion from or the ghettoization of the Jews in every Christian nation of Europe. That killing violence finally exploded in the genocidal horror of the Holocaust in which 6,000,000 people died as the victims of religion gone mad. It was this system that also expressed itself in the Crusades of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries that sought to kill the infidel Muslims. These fourth century creeds also gave birth to heresy hunts, religious wars and the Inquisition. It takes enormous energy to keep dying explanations viable.
	By the time the 13th century arrived, we turned these dated theological explanations into liturgies and repeated them in worship. Far more than most people recognize, the worship services in all Christian churches were born in 13th century understandings and practices. In that era, human life was denigrated and devalued. So Christian worship began to proclaim that we were “born in sin,” that we were “miserable offenders” and that we were not worthy to “gather up the crumbs under the divine table.” In our hymns we began to call ourselves “wretches” and “worms.” Life became something to be escaped, not something to be lived. We proclaimed a God who was all-seeing, one “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid” and thus a God before whom we quaked in fear and were compelled constantly to beg for mercy. Perhaps that is why worship seems so strange, so unpleasant, so boring to people in the 21st century. That is not our understanding of life.
	Can we Christians escape, or at least relativize, our explanations from the past without losing in the process the power of the experiences which caused the explanations in the first place? That is the perennial question that both religion and theology asks. The clear answer is that if one literalizes any explanation of an experience, that experience becomes mortal and it is doomed to die. Truth is thus never served by static religious or theological explanations. This means that the Bible cannot be taken literally unless one wants the Bible to die. That means that orthodoxy can never be defined in creeds or doctrines unless one wants orthodoxy to die. This means that liturgical forms must always be changing, they can never be set in stone unless one wants all liturgies to become irrelevant.
	So religion as we now know and practice it is doomed. Once it is literalized, its destiny is only to create fundamentalists who will exact enormous energy from us in order to protect the religious formulas of the past and when they fail at this task, as they are destined to, they will produce secular humanists who can no longer live with integrity in those religious definitions of antiquity and so they will abandon all religion. The Church Alumni Association will be the fastest growing organization in the heretofore Christian world. That is where we are. What can we do about it? That will be my topic next week.
	~John Shelby Spong
	Read the essay online here.

	Question & Answer
	Zolika Heath from Ocala, Florida, writes:

	Question:
	The Trinity: How did this doctrine evolve? Is it polytheistic? Father, Son and Spirit are in scripture but is "Trinity?"

	Answer:
	Dear Zolika,
	Your question is a very good one. I doubt that Jesus was a Trinitarian; I am quite certain that Paul was not. The Trinity is a human definition of God, and since the human mind could never fully embrace the mystery and wonder of God, to literalize a human definition of God borders on the absurd. For human beings to worship their own creation is the essence of idolatry.
	The Trinity is a definition not of God, but of the human experience of the divine and is, therefore, an attempt to make rational sense out of that human experience.
	We experience God as other, beyond anything that our minds can grasp. This is what we mean when we say God is Father – the Ground of all being.
	We experience God as an inward presence, so deep within us that we cannot name the reality we know is there. That is what we mean when we say God is Spirit, ineffable, life-giving, inward and real.
	We experience God in the life of others. Sometimes to lesser degrees, sometimes to what seems like a total degree. This is what we mean when we call Jesus “the son,” and why we frame doctrines like “the Incarnation.” Our experience was and is that in Jesus we saw the presence of God flowing through his human life.
	Is that who God is? No, but that is what our experience of God is and so we claim it.
	The Trinity is not a definition of God; it is an experience into which we live.
	Thanks for asking,

	~John Shelby Spong

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