[Dialogue] 11/24/16, Spong/Matthew Fox: A New Christianity, a New Prayer Bishop Spong Style
Ellie Stock via Dialogue
dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net
Thu Nov 24 09:38:33 PST 2016
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<div style="color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;text-align: left;"><span style="font-family:georgia,times,times new roman,serif"><span style="font-size:14px"><strong>Matthew Fox, Creation Spirituality returns as this week's guest author ...</strong></span></span>
<hr>
<h1 style="color: #003d4a;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 34px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">A New Christianity, a New Prayer Bishop Spong Style</h1>
<p style="text-align: center;">“<em>My goal in life is to pray without ceasing”</em>.
Bishop John Shelby Spong</p>
<p>In his book <em>A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How A New Faith is Being Born</em>, Bishop Spong addresses multiple issues worthy of further consideration especially because the coming year 2017, marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and Spong is rightly calling for a Reformation today.<span style="font-size:12px">(1)</span> I suppose it is worth mentioning that I have been doing the same as in my book <em>A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity</em> which contains the 95 theses that I pounded at Luther’s church in Wittenberg at Pentecost season in 2006 in response to Cardinal Ratzinger making himself pope, a practice I repeated five years later at Cardinal Law’s Basilica of Maria Maggiore in Rome on a Sunday morning in protest of his cover-up for pedophile clergy in his previous assignment as archbishop of Boston.<span style="font-size:12px">(2)</span></p>
<p>Let me highlight one of Spong’s important insights for a New Christianity by interacting with the chapter from his book entitled “<em>But What About Prayer</em>?” (Chapter Eleven). Spong speaks of how his understanding of prayer underwent a deep metamorphosis as he moved out of a theistic understanding of God. Following are some of his observations:</p>
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<p><em>I struggle to think of God in non-theistic patterns while I continue to be a praying, worshiping Christian… Somehow prayer and liturgy are the places where the non-theistic God-concept most obviously collides with the religious security system erected by the worshipers of the theistic God…To whom do we pray? is at the heart of questions asked by those considering abandonment of theism… I get the impression that many believers think of prayers as adult letters to Santa Claus. (Page 190)</em></p>
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<p>Spong invokes Paul’s admonition to “pray always”- an admonition also found in Luke’s gospel which goes like this:</p>
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<p><em>Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to the chosen ones who cry out day and night? Will God delay long in helping them? I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them.” Luke (18:1–8).</em></p>
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<p>In creating a story about “praying always and not losing heart” the words justice and injustice are used by Jesus over five times in a short paragraph. Paul too used the term “pray always” on a number of occasions.</p>
<p>So what is prayer? If we see it as “talking to God,” it makes no sense. Talking all day long to God would justify putting you in a padded cell. Spong is offering a parallel observation when he declares that “theism is dead… But theism is also a security blanket with which we are loathe to part.” (Page 192)</p>
<p>But if prayer is about demanding justice and working for justice then “praying always” makes all the sense in the world. Justice and the quest for justice seize our lives and dictate our values and work, our allies and enemies, our struggle and our learning all our lives long.</p>
<p>Like Spong, I feel that how we understand prayer lies at the heart of our theological and spiritual identity. In fact, my first book was dedicated to the question raised in this book – what is prayer? In that book, with the unlikely title of <em>On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear: Spirituality American Style</em>, I defined prayer as a “radical (or deep) response to Life” and I name two of our deepest responses to living are our YES (our mysticism, our falling in love with life); and our NO, our resistance, our standing up for justice and against injustice. I still hold to that definition for prayer today forty-three years later and the Gospel passage I just cited I think is saying the same thing.</p>
<p>To stand up for justice is to “pray always” and to listen deeply to the beauty and awe that life offers us daily is also to “pray always.” Consider Standing Rock; Black Lives Matter; Sister Dorothy Stang who was murdered eleven years ago in the Amazon because she stood up with the peasants of the land against the rape of the rainforests and the abuse toward peasant farmers; and she paid the price of a martyr. BUT she was not just about justice; she was about love; she loved the rain forest and the earth and the peasants whom she refused to abandon. I know because she was part of our master’s program in Creation Spirituality and she wrote about her passion for the earth. She would often dance in the forest that she loved so much. “Greater love than this no person has, than to lay down their life for their friends.”</p>
<p>Who are our friends? What/whom do we truly cherish and would we stand up to defend? Those questions lie behind the depths of our prayer and the directions our prayer takes us. Rabbi Heschel says that “praise precedes faith” and it is clear when dealing with justice that love precedes justice for we defend what we cherish. Furthermore, love follows on justice for justice is not an end in itself but a resetting of the table so that more people can experience the depth of their love of life and the joy and beauty that life can bestow on all beings.</p>
<p>It is this dialectic of love or mysticism and of spiritual warrior-hood—defending what we love—that constitutes authentic adult spirituality and adult prayer: It is our deep Yes and our deep No, therefore our “radical (deep) response to life.” I am in full agreement with Spong and other mystics through the ages (Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart and Howard Thurman among them) who understand God as Life. We are all mystics and prophets. Our deep response to life is our prayer.</p>
<p>Writer E. B. White once said, “I wake up in the morning torn between savoring the world; and saving it. This makes it hard to plan the day.” Yes, savoring is our contemplation, our mysticism; saving it is our prophetic work of sacred activism. We need both. Our prophetic work must come from a deep place, a place of prayer therefore and NOT from an action/reaction response of our reptilian brains. There’s enough of that going around. If we are ever-deepening lovers of life (mystics); and defenders of life (prophets or sacred activists), then we are a people who “pray always” and we can “take heart” in trying times.</p>
<p>Spong proposes turning to more mystical traditions to find a deeper understanding of prayer and speaks of meditation, contemplation and “centering prayer.” (Page 193) Here we are speaking of the Via Negativa, the letting go and surrendering that is part of that journey into an unknown God, into darkness, into the depths of unknowing. His call for “a new definition of prayer” is what I have been about in my writings and my educational programs ever since I wrote my first book (whose title has sobered up a bit in the most recent edition of the book which is simply: “<em>Prayer: A Radical Response to Life</em>.”) Rightly does Spong criticize those understandings of prayer that propose that we can “manipulate and control God by receiving a payoff.” (Page 194) Meister Eckhart observed the same thing when he said many people love God like they do a cow—for the cheese and milk they can get from it. But, said Eckhart, “truth does not long for any kind of commercial deals.”<span style="font-size:12px">(3) </span>We must learn to live and work and love, says Eckhart, “without a why.”<span style="font-size:12px">(4)</span> And this applies to prayer also. Spong is in good company.</p>
<p>Spong also proposes that the “second coming” is meant to be “the same God who was present in Jesus who comes again into our world in us and through us… Can we dare to embrace the possibility that we ourselves might be the second coming of Christ?” (Page 194) This is exactly the thesis I laid out in my book <em>The Coming of the Cosmic Christ</em>— if we are other Christs- which is what we are called to be- then the second coming is our coming alive and real, deep and committed both to a radical love of life and to a deep defending of life, thus to both our deepest mystical and prophetic selves. As we undergo this deepening on a daily, a yearly, a seasonal basis, we are changed and history might be change through us. As Spong puts it, “change in who I am brings change in what I can do.” (Page 200)</p>
<p>~Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox</p>
<p>About the Author:</p>
<p>Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 60 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship. His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas.
</p>
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<p><span style="font-size:12px">(1) John Shelby Spong, <em>A New Christianity For a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born</em> (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:12px">(2) I tell the fuller story and list my theses in <em>Matthew Fox, A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity</em> (Rochester, Vt: Inner Traditions, 2006). And I include the Rome event in <em>Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest</em> (Berkeley, Ca: North Atlantic Books, 2015), 379-380.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:12px">(3) See Sermon 32: “Driving Merchants Mentalities from Our Souls: Economics and Compassion” in <em>Matthew Fox, Passion For Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart </em>(Rochester, Vt: Inner Traditions, 2000), 451.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:12px">(4) See ibid., 202-212.</span></p>
<p>Read the essay online <a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=1e9643f083&e=db34daa597">here</a>.</p>
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<h2 style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 30px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">Question & Answer</h2>
<p><span style="font-size:18px">David from Jamaica, W.I. writes:</span></p>
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Question:</h4>
<p>If the Virgin Birth is not true, then how could Christ, in his completely human conceived state, accomplish salvation for mankind?</p>
<h4 style="color: #4487cf;display: block;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 22px;font-weight: normal;line-height: 100%;margin-top: 0;margin-right: 0;margin-bottom: 10px;margin-left: 0;text-align: left;">Answer:</h4>
<p>Dear David,</p>
<p>Your question assumes that it was the Virgin Birth, which made Christ divine. I think it was the experience people had of meeting God in Jesus that created the narratives of the Virgin Birth. That tradition represents a primitive first century attempt to answer the question how it was that God got into Jesus so that people could have a God experience with Jesus. It is interesting to me that only Matthew and Luke resort to this explanation. Paul says only that Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law." Mark says that God entered him at the time of the baptism when the heavens opened and the Spirit descended. John says he was the pre-existent Word or Logos, and described him in the Johanine text on two occasions as "the son of Joseph."</p>
<p>It is fascinating to me to note that the portraits of the most divine Christ in the New Testament are drawn by Paul, who appears never to have heard of the miraculous tradition of Jesus birth and by John who dismissed the virgin birth tradition in favor of the pre-existent Jesus.</p>
<p>The deeper question you need to raise is who is God that we experienced the divine presence in Jesus? But that would take longer than a Q & A column will allow. I do cover that in great detail in my book, Born of A Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth and the Place of Women in a Male Dominated Church.</p>
<p>~John Shelby Spong
<a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=1378290973&e=db34daa597">Read and Share Online Here</a></p>
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<span style="font-size:18px">Join Bishop John Shelby Spong as he takes us on a journey to the times of Jesus’ birth ... click below image to purchase book.</span>
<div style="text-align: center;color: #000000;font-family: Georgia;font-size: 16px;line-height: 150%;"><a target="_blank" style="color: #4487cf;font-weight: normal;text-decoration: underline;" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://johnshelbyspong.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=b51b9cf441b059bb232418480&id=938554cfc3&e=db34daa597"><img align="none" height="400" style="width: 266px;height: 400px;margin: 0px;border: none;font-size: 14px;font-weight: bold;line-height: 100%;outline: none;text-decoration: none;text-transform: capitalize;display: inline;" width="266" src="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/b51b9cf441b059bb232418480/images/a892aa7e-9d4b-4353-b74c-3beaf117759e.jpg"></a>
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Bishop Spong continues his recovery and wants to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. If you would like to send Bishop Spong a get well note please sent it to <a href="mailto:admin at progressivechristianity.org">admin at progressivechristianity.org</a> and we will forward it to him.</div>
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<td colspan="2" valign="middle" id="aolmail_social" style="background-color: #FAFAFA;border: 0;">
<div style="color: #707070;font-family: Arial;font-size: 12px;line-height: 125%;text-align: center;"></div></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" valign="middle" id="aolmail_utility" style="background-color: #FDFDFD;border: 1px dashed #d3d3d3;"><div style="color: #707070;font-family: Arial;font-size: 12px;line-height: 125%;text-align: center;"><div class="aolmail_vcard"><div class="aolmail_adr"><div class="aolmail_street-address"></div></div></div></div></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2" valign="middle" id="aolmail_utility"><div style="color: #707070;font-family: Arial;font-size: 12px;line-height: 125%;text-align: left;"></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></center><center><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="100%" id="aolmail_canspamBarWrapper" style="background-color:#FFFFFF; border-top:1px solid #E5E5E5;"><tbody><tr><td align="center" valign="top" style="padding-top:20px; padding-bottom:20px;">
</td></tr></tbody></table></center></div>
</div>
<style type="text/css">#AOLMsgPart_2_d0e3f49c-05d5-4d73-a52f-b9d92a4bebce td{color: black;} @media only screen and (max-width: 480px){ .aolReplacedBody table#aolmail_canspamBar td{font-size:14px !important;} .aolReplacedBody table#aolmail_canspamBar td a{display:block !important; margin-top:10px !important;} } </style>
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