[Dialogue] 10/06/10: Spong (Fox): Responding to Bishop Spong’s 12 Principles and the Future of Religion

Thu Oct 6 07:00:33 PDT 2016

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Dear Faithful Readers: Bishop Spong is now home in New Jersey and continues to recuperate from his stroke. Until he is back to his writing we will continue to publish Weekly Essays, some from his treasure trove of past essays and some from guest authors. This week we are pleased to offer you this article from the Rev. Matthew Fox.

Responding to Bishop Spong’s
12 Principles and the Future of Religion
A recent national poll on millennial thinking (defining millennials as ages 18 to 34), found that millennials have very little confidence in establishment institutions. Indeed, more trust the military (55%) far more than organized religion—25%. This is a generation after all that has grown up with news of pedophile priest scandals and their cover-up by institutional religious leaders, as well as the collapse of the economic titans and their economy.
It strikes me that Bishop John Spong’s prophetic questioning of Christianity’s dogmas and structures would sit quite well with these young people, one might even say that he is posing the questions that they are asking about when it comes to organized religion. In this way he is and has been a prophetic voice (when, as Rabbi Heschel point out, the primary work of the prophet is to interfere) interfering with taken-for-granted religious doctrines for decades. He has dared to criticize religion and envision a different future for Christianity even while remaining part of the church structure. This takes quite a lot of doing and dancing! No wonder he has stayed so young! Now he is calling for a “New Reformation” and has laid out 12 principles that are equally challenges to the religious status quo.
I will respond to Spong’s 12 principles here with a brief comment by myself in italics working out of the Creation Spirituality lineage.
1. God
Understanding God in theistic categories as “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to the world and capable of invading the world with miraculous power” is no longer believable. Most God talk in liturgy and conversation has thus become meaningless. I talk about a panentheistic God, which is non-theistic, but is a God who is in all things and all things are in God. Also the apophatic God, the God of “superessential darkness” who “has no name and will never be given a name” (Eckhart) is demanding to be revisited.
2. Jesus – the Christ
If God can no longer be thought of in theistic terms, then conceiving of Jesus as “the incarnation of the theistic deity” has also become a bankrupt concept. The historical Jesus was a supreme teacher of action and contemplation and of Compassion and our shared work of Divinity. There is also the Christ of the Creeds that Spong wants to create distance from. But the third nature of Christ –The Cosmic Christ archetype–, the light in every being, names the inherent God-like-ness of each and every being, ourselves included. It finds a parallel concept in the “Buddha Nature” understanding in the East and in the “image of God” concept in Judaism. (1)
3. Original Sin – The Myth of the Fall
The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which we human beings have fallen into “Original Sin” is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense. Jesus never heard of original sin—no Jew has. Original Blessing displaces original sin, since for 13.8 billion years our species has been blessed by choices of the universe that resulted in our existence as well as the rich and blessed world in which we live. Sin is the refusal to say Yes and Thank You for that original blessing.
4. The Virgin Birth
The virgin birth understood as literal biology is impossible. Far from being a bulwark in defense of the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth actually destroys that divinity. According to Otto Rank, the archetypal meaning of the Virgin Birth is that it distinguished the goddess religion Christianity from other goddess religions of the Mediterranean area by insisting that this divine son did not have intercourse with his mother but left home to preach a radical teaching of justice and compassion.
5. Jesus as the Worker of Miracles
In a post-Newtonian world supernatural invasions of the natural order, performed by God or an “incarnate Jesus,” are simply not viable explanations of what actually happened. Thomas Aquinas says that the greatest miracle of all is a virtuous life—in that regard Jesus incarnated and taught this most important miracle. Miracle is about “marvel” and the greatest of all marvels is existence itself (Eckhart: “Existence is God.”)
6. Atonement Theology
Atonement theology, especially in its most bizarre “substitutionary” form, presents us with a God who is barbaric, a Jesus who is a victim and it turns human beings into little more than guilt-filled creatures. The phrase “Jesus died for my sins” is not just dangerous, it is absurd. If life is a blessing and not a curse and our origins are a blessing then at-one-ment with the Divine is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching and accomplishment, not atonement. Another word for “at-one-ment” is mysticism, the experiencing of oneness with the Divine.
7. The Resurrection
The Easter event transformed the Christian movement, but that does not mean that it was the physical resuscitation of Jesus’ deceased body back into human history. The earliest biblical records state that “God raised him.” Into what, we need to ask. The experience of resurrection must be separated from its later mythological explanations. Frequently I ask audiences to shut their eyes and then raise their hands if they have experienced the presence of a loved one after they died. Often 80% of the audience have had such experiences. If we have had them in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, what is to deny that people who loved Jesus might have had similar experiences in the first century?
8. The Ascension of Jesus
The biblical story of Jesus’ ascension assumes a three-tiered universe, which was dismissed some five hundred years ago. If Jesus’ ascension was a literal event of history, it is beyond the capacity of our 21st century minds to accept it or to believe it. Buckminster Fuller used to say “anyone who is still using the words ‘up’ and ‘down’ is 500 years out of date.” The basic dynamic of a curved universe and a curved earth is in and out, not up and down. In what way did Jesus go out and how deeply has his message traveled into our souls and culture after his exit from this plane?
9. Ethics
The ability to define and to separate good from evil can no longer be achieved with appeals to ancient codes like the Ten Commandments or even the Sermon on the Mount. Contemporary moral standards must be hammered out in the juxtaposition between life-affirming moral principles and external situations. In my recent book on evil, “Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil and Soul and Society” I take the 7 chakras of the East and compare them to the 7 Capital sins of the West to come up with a new language and understanding by which to confront evil. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas also rejected lists of commandments and instead based his ethics on an invitation to a virtuous life.
10. Prayer
Prayer, understood as a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history, is little more than an hysterical attempt to turn the holy into the servant of the human. Most of our prayer definitions of the past are thus dependent on an understanding of God that has died. I have defined prayer as “a radical response to life” whereby we say Yes to life (our mystical self) and No to injustice (our prophetic call).(2)
11. Life after Death
The hope for life after death must be separated forever from behavior control. Traditional views of heaven and hell as places of reward and punishment are no longer conceivable. Christianity must, therefore, abandon its dependence on guilt as a motivator of behavior. Einstein says no energy is lost in the universe and Hildegard of Bingen says that no beauty is lost in the universe. Eckhart says that at death life dies but being goes on. In what forms does being go on? Some say Reincarnation; others Regeneration; others Resurrection. Truth is these are not that far apart. Aquinas says there are two resurrections in life: The first is waking up in this lifetime and if we undergo that we do not have to worry about the second.
12. Judgment and Discrimination
Judgment is not a human responsibility. Discrimination against any human being on the basis of that which is a “given” is always evil and does not serve the Christian goal of giving “abundant life” to all. Any structure either in the secular world or in the institutional church, which diminishes the humanity of any child of God on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation must be exposed publicly and vigorously. There can be no reason in the church of tomorrow for excusing or even forgiving discriminatory practices. “Sacred Tradition” must never again provide a cover to justify discriminatory evil. Science assists us in recognizing the immense diversity of creation and of human backgrounds and preferences. We cannot develop our capacity for discernment or for judgment and growing a conscience without consulting science.
Rev. Matthew Fox
About the Author:
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. Among his books are Original Blessing, The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, The Reinvention of Work, A Spirituality Named Compassion and Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times.
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1. See David Mevorach Seidenberg, Kabbalah and Ecology: God’s Image in the More-Than-Human World (NY: Cambridge Univ Press, 2015).
2. See Matthew Fox, Prayer: A Radical Response to Life (NY: Jeremy Tarcher, 2001).
Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer
Barry Duell from Kawagoe, Japan, writes:

Question:
Hearing you in public and reading your wisdom inspires me to reconsider my Christian upbringing in a more progressive way, thank you.
The Cross, an instrument of death, repels me as a barbaric way to symbolize Christianity.  Were a modern day Jesus or a female equivalent to die from gunfire, would it be appropriate for the resulting places of worship to feature guns on top of their buildings, for religious leaders to wear guns around their neck, for the guns to be featured in earrings and other accessories, all for honoring the new messiah?
Answer:
Dear Barry,
You ask a good question in a very provocative way.  It rises, however, out of a much distorted version of Christianity that originated not with Jesus, but in the 4th century of Christian history when the church entered a period of focusing on sin and guilt that still characterizes Christianity to this day.  It is a focus that I think will be the death of Christianity unless it is challenged, uprooted and removed.  It is focused in that pious “mantra” that “Jesus died for my sins.”  Since that death was on a cross, the instrument of death has become the symbol of salvation.  So it appears on the steeples of our churches, is worn around our necks, as earrings and is stamped on the front of Bibles. I do not want to remove it.  I want only to transform it from the definition of sin and guilt to an image of what it means to give one’s life away in love for another.  Let me explain.
The 4th century, the century in which the creeds were adopted and Christianity was set on its historical path, was dominated theologically by a man named Augustine, who was the bishop of Hippo in North Africa.  He was a convert to Christianity from a religion called Manichaeism, which was dualistic in nature, dividing the world into good and evil, heaven and earth, body and soul, flesh and spirit.
Augustine was obsessed with sin and he reveals this in his autobiographical work entitled The Confessions of St. Augustine.  He described his will as being oriented toward the gratification of the flesh. He found himself incapable of not “falling into sin” and he prayed to be delivered from his obsession with evil.
Reading the book of Genesis, he put his experience into that ancient Hebrew myth of the seven-day creation and its perfection in chapter one of Genesis and the expulsion of the human family from the Garden of Eden in chapter two of Genesis, building his theology on the juxtaposition of those two narratives.  He thought, mistakenly, we now know, that Genesis, chapters one and two, were sequential chapters in a book that he was convinced that God had dictated. So he postulated an original perfection for human life, followed by a cosmic fall into what came to be called “original sin.” So he saw all life as “fallen,” sinful and incapable of being restored to the perfection for which we had been created.
Given this diagnosis, he went on to prescribe the cure.  Jesus was God’s rescue operation, designed to save us from the sin of the fall.  The way we were saved was that God punished Jesus for our sins.  So the justice of God was satisfied and the fall of human life was overcome in the story of salvation.  Jesus was the savior and the cross was the symbol of that redemptive act.  The cross, therefore, became the identifying symbol of Christianity itself.  I regard this as a barbaric way to describe the Christian story.  It gives us first a God, who cannot forgive and second a deity, who requires a human sacrifice or a blood offering before forgiveness becomes appropriate.  Such a deity seems to me to be a monster.  It then requires a Jesus who enjoys suffering, who is eager to mount his cross to die.  Perhaps Jesus is a masochist, who enjoys suffering.  Finally, it presents human life as guilt-laden and evil for it was our sins that caused God to punish Jesus on the cross.
The best thing I can tell you about this theology is that it is simply not so, it is not biblical, it is not Christianity.  There was no original perfection.  We who live on the other side of Charles Darwin now know that life emerged on this planet about 3.8 billion years ago in the form of a single cell.  We did not begin, even metaphorically, as a perfect man and a perfect woman in the Garden of Eden.  From that single cell of life, we journeyed through a series of stages from single cells to cell clusters to a division between animate life and inanimate life to the appearance of primitive consciousness on the animate side of life and finally to self-consciousness and the rise of authentic human life, a stage that may be as recent as 250,000 years ago.
There was no original perfection.  Since there was no original perfection, there could not have been a fall into “original sin.”  One cannot “fall” from a status one never possessed.  If there was no fall, there could not have been a rescue. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened, nor can one be restored to a status one has never possessed.  So this understanding of the place of the cross in the Christian story is not only crude, but also nonsensical.  Indeed, it is simply wrong.
So, if we are not fallen sinners, who need to be saved, then what are we? We are incomplete people, who yearn to be made whole and complete.  Salvation is thus not to be rescued from sin, but to be empowered to become more deeply and fully human.  In the insecure status of our historic struggle to survive within the evolutionary process, our own survival became the dominant human drive.  If my survival is my highest value, I will view anything and everyone through that lens.  All things will be subordinated to my need to survive.  The result will be a radically self-centered creature. Salvation in that scenario would be the freedom to transcend this biological drive to achieve survival and in the process free me to be able to give my life away in love for another.  That is what the cross stands for to me and that is why I honor the cross and do not want it to be removed from its central place in Christianity. I seek rather to make this transformed meaning that which is central to Christianity.
So I wear a cross and I seek to live out a Christianity based on a humanity that can transcend the survival nature of our own biology, a humanity that reveals the freedom to love someone else more than I love myself.  That to me is to experience the presence of God.  That is why I join Paul in saying: “Yes, God was in Christ.”  We see God when love calls us into the fullness of life.
Thanks for your question. I hope this helps.
John Shelby Spong

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