[Dialogue] 4/26/18, Progressing Spirit: Plumer, What is God?; Spong revisited

Thu Apr 26 06:52:39 PDT 2018

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What is God?

 Essay by Fred C. Plumer on April 26, 2018
A few weeks ago, I recommended to our Progressing Spirit writers that we should all write articles that responded to Bishop Spong’s book, Unbelievable. Then it hit me. I was going to be doing the article this week and as I had suggested to our writers, I would have to start with Spong’s first thesis. “Holy moly,” what was I thinking? For Spong’s first thesis is “God.” Now, I am a student of the Bible. I have been studying it for over forty years. Nearly thirty years ago I came to the dramatic conclusion that the vast majority, if not the entire Bible, was written as metaphor by people who may have been very bright for their time in history but were largely ignorant of the world that inherited this book. We really do not understand the world they lived in, and obviously, they did not understand the world we live in today. Many of their sincere beliefs would be considered, at best, superstitions today. That is one of the reasons it has always amazed me people can argue for an inerrant interpretation of the Bible, using the Bible to “prove” their own interpretation.
And then there is the issue of God. I know of no subject that is more challenging to discuss then the subject of God. Does this God answer our prayers? If not, why are we still saying them in most of our churches?  I sincerely believe if we could poll the members of a two hundred member church, and ask them if they believed in God, we would get two hundred different answers. Spong suggest that this is largely the result of thinking of God as a “being.” He writes, “What we must do is find the meaning to which the word ‘God’ points.”
Now I am not overly concerned about the readers of this column. Most of us have not believed in a “God-being” sitting up in the skies waiting to hear our prayers. Most of us, I suspect, get a strange feeling when we say the Lord’s Prayer, whichever version we use,  when we get to the “forgive us our sins” or frankly any part of the famous prayer. Do we really believe that “God” is even listening or is going to forgive us? Do we really believe that “God” will answer our petitions? Do we believe in a God? If so, what is God?
Spong continues, “God is not a being, not even a supreme being. A being is something that exists in time and space, but we are trying to describe that which is ultimate, unbound, meaning that such terminology-the category of existence –cannot be used.”
This is apparently harder than it sounds. That may be one of the reasons several well-known theologians have suggested that we give up using the term “God” at least for an extended period of time until people of the next generation can “reconceive” its true meaning.
Paul Tillich suggested something similar several decades ago. “We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is.”
Spong starts his thesis by stating once you are thinking of God not as a being then you begin to think of God as a “doorway” of a new experience of life. He writes, “My doorway into God is to take my God experience seriously and then to live it as deeply as I can…How do I experience God? First, I experience God as Life.”
So what do we do with this? How do I approach the subject while offending the fewest number of people? I suppose I could dazzle you with something like Tillich wrote, but I am not Paul Tillich, or Bishop Spong for that matter. So I suggest we look at a few of the ideas that are out there right now. Certainly one of the best ways to approach this is to give some concrete examples.
One is the Oasis Communities. Oasis communities started around 2012 in this country. At last count they have to over 12 communities across the States and two in Canada. They started as an alternative, atheist “church” but they have grown-up since then. Their anti-attitude toward a god has transitioned a bit since they first started. They now say they do not believe in an intercessory god or a being. They gather on Sunday mornings because the leaders ascertained that this was the time that most folks had the least commitments. Their core values that are stated on the website are:
1. People are more important than beliefs.
2. Reality is known through reason.
3. Meaning comes from making a difference.
4. Human hands solve human problems.
5. Be accepting and be accepted.
Another organization you might find interesting is called The Clergy Project. It is growing rapidly. The organization works with clergy who want to “come out of the closet,” meaning to proclaim to their congregations that they no longer can in good conscious use the term God. They consider themselves atheist. None of them believe in a theistic god and have given up trying to “fake” it in church.  The Clergy Project was started to help these people either by learning how to reconfigure their ministry by becoming more honest in their churches or through helping them find another profession. You may want to look them up on the web. (clergyproject.org) If you do, you might be interested in reading the story by John Harkey Gibbs, currently on the front page of the Clergy Project.
One of our regular writers, Gretta Vosper, is part of this organization and is a very effective pastor in her own church. A couple of you have notified us that you have stopped reading her articles because you do not like the term “atheist.” I suggest you take another look at what Ms. Vosper is writing. She does not believe in an intervening God, and does not believe there is anything “up there” or “out there” that she would call “godlike.” Vosper has been challenged by a few of her former church members, but far more by her denominational hierarchy.
And yet she has a vital church that works very well for a lot of people. The congregation has no desire to “please” God, and most of the congregants are better for that. Their focus is about caring and pleasing each other as a community. If someone has a problem they may be more comfortable discussing it with a peer rather than with clergy or more importantly, asking “God” to fix it.  I suggest you read her first book, With or Without God. She makes a solid argument that we should remove the term god from our vocabulary in the church.
Vosper writes, “It is time for the church to give up that truth-testing role. Those in leadership positions in the church are fully aware that whatever god is, it is not described by the church’s doctrines. They are even aware that there may be no such thing as god.”
Perhaps John Robinson, Ph.D., D.Min who is a clinical psychologist with a second doctorate in ministry, has the right idea. Robinson believes that God exists and it is “us.” In his most recent book, The Divine Human: The Final Transformation of Sacred Aging, he writes; “The Divine Human is someone who experiences body, self and the world as literally divine. It’s a state of consciousness free of identity, time and story, and the whole problem-ridden labyrinth of left brain thinking that dominates our lives. In mystical awareness, we experience our “own” consciousness and being as the consciousness and being of God.”
Robinson says the answer is less religion and more mysticism. He suggests that we have been looking in all the wrong places for God. He explains that Jesus was a mystic first and foremost. When Jesus said we live in a sacred and divine world he meant something more than, “this is a beautiful world.”  This beautiful world is actually an opportunity to discover who and what we are. He quotes Jesus, “The father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth and people do not see it…What you look for has come, but you do not know it.”(Gospel of Thomas, Marvin Meyer and Harold Bloom p65, 113)
And in Robinson’s same book he also quotes Joseph Campbell, “This is it. This is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world. The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.”
Once we “wake up” and see this reality, according to Robinson, we will also realize that we are gods or godlike. It is something we can experience any time…but we have to do the work. In part we have to learn how to become mystics through meditation, changing our attitudes and opening our eyes.
Robinson may have a point here. If we really began to see the world as sacred and our lives as a divine experience, how would that change our vison of the world and the way we experience it? How would that change the world? Can we even imagine the sense of becoming godly as we work through our lives? It is an intriguing idea.
And finally, for years now, I have wondered about the string theory. In short, it is the idea that the entire universe is connected with some kind of invisible string and this “string” moves in large waves. It brings me back to the Buddhist saying, when a butterfly flaps its wings, the world is changed. Is that something we could refer to as god or God? Just the idea of being interconnected to each other, let alone to things we do not even think of or know about, is tantalizing to me. The bottom line with this way of reasoning is that we still are responsible for our lives. Yes, other people, animals, plants, whatever, may be “pulling on our string” or strings, but we still have to decide how we are going to live our lives.
So I bring you back to Bishop Spong’s explanation of God. In short he says God is explainable only through experience. And how do we experience God, according to Spong? “I experience God as Life.”
Maybe another good start would be to keep the wisdom of naturalist John Burroughs in mind when we are entering that doorway:  the more we allow science, reason and wonder to lead us forward down the trail, the more we find ourselves “at home in the universe.”
~ Fred C. Plumer

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About the Author
In 1986 Rev. Plumer was called to the Irvine United Congregational Church in Irvine, CA to lead a UCC new start church, where he remained until he retired in 2004. The church became known throughout the denomination as one of the more exciting and progressive mid-size congregations in the nation. He served on the Board of Directors of the Southern California Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC) for five years, and chaired the Commission for Church Development and Evangelism for three of those years.
In 2006 Fred was elected President of ProgressiveChristianity.org (originally called The Center for Progressive Christianity – TCPC) when it’s founder Jim Adams retired. As a member of the Executive Council for TCPC he wrote The Study Guide for The 8 Points by which we define: Progressive Christianity. He has had several articles published on church development, building faith communities and redefining the purpose of the enlightened Christian Church. His book Drink from the Well is an anthology from speeches, articles in eBulletins, and numerous publications that define the progressive Christianity movement as it evolves to meet new challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Question & Answer

Q: By Ralf from Oklahoma

Recently, while in the middle of a difficult and tragic event in my life, a friend told me not to worry because God has a hand in everything that happens and that means that everything that happen is meant for good. He even suggested I read Romans 8:28.

Do you think that's what the verse actually means?

A: By Rev. Mark Sandlin

Dear Ralph,

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” —Romans 8:28

This verse is so chock full of issues I barely know where to start. Considering there are so many issues, I think I'll just focus on the overarching problem – certainty.
When folks quote this they tend to say it loaded with a bunch of theological perspectives that they hold to strongly simply because they were told to, or want to, or they have blind faith in them. The thing is, even scholars who spend their careers looking at these theological issues find it hard to say, with certainty, that they definitely have one “correct” understanding of Romans 8:28.
Let’s just look at one piece of the verse: “in all things God works for the good…”. Most folks who like to quote this scripture hear it as saying “all things are meant for good by God.” But, that way of seeing the world elevates tragedy into blessing and dismisses human grief as an inability to understand God’s “larger plan” or the “mystery of God.”
>From the holocaust, to Rwanda, to child abuse, to the 21,000 people who die every day due to hunger related causes, this take on the providence of God paints a picture of a God who creates death and suffering in order to achieve some supposed greater good.
That’s no god.
It’s not even what the verse says.
It says, “in all things God works for the good.”
Perhaps what is being said is that in all things (even things humanity creates that are horrible and tragic)God is endeavoring to create something good.
And perhaps the reason God struggles to do so, is that the only tools he has available are us – God’s people.
So, no. I definitely don't think that's what the verse actually means.
PEACE!

~ Rev. Mark Sandlin

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About the Author
Rev. Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press' Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on "The Huffington Post," "Sojourners," "Time," "Church World Services," and even the "Richard Dawkins Foundation." He's been featured on PBS's "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" and NPR's "The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin

Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Debating with Evangelicals

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on June 22, 2005

 Twice recently, I have had the opportunity to engage in public debate two people who identify themselves as evangelicals, the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and the Rev. Dr. William Craig, a non-residential “Research Professor of Philosophy” at the Talbot School of Theology, an evangelical school in La Mirada, California. The venues for these debates were quite different. Dr. Mohler and I were in two studios in different cities so we never actually met, nor could I see him. Dr. Craig and I shared the stage before a live audience in an auditorium at Bethel College in Ohio. The subject matter was also different. With Dr. Mohler, it was the Bible and how one is to approach the sacred text, while with Dr. Craig we limited our subject to the resurrection of Jesus as the gospels describe it.
These two gentlemen differed greatly in personality. Dr. Mohler was overtly aggressive, while Dr. Craig was quite civil, despite slipping occasionally into ‘cuteness.’ There was, however, little to distinguish their perspectives. In typical evangelical style both validated their points of view by describing the time when each “gave myself to the Lord,” suggesting in subtle ways that without this saving moment, rational conversation about the Bible had little relevance. Yet both of these guardians of the literal Bible appeared to me to be highly defensive.
Their defensiveness was apparent first in their constant citing of the names of those biblical authorities they quoted to justify their evangelical conclusions. They worked hard to build up the credibility of these ‘scholars’, listing their degrees and publications and stating that they represented a new wave of learning. That was, they suggested, why I might never have heard of them. It was an argument not dissimilar from the way evangelicals also quote certain ‘scientists’ who, they claim “challenge Darwin and evolution in the name of science.” An investigation of the credentials of these authorities, however, reveals that the majority of their degrees come from evangelical schools and that their books are published by evangelical publishers. When these facts are raised to consciousness, the response is typically that “liberals do not take evangelical scholarship seriously because of an intellectual bias.”
I confess that I plead guilty to that charge to this degree. I can read two or three pages of the work of someone described as an “evangelical scholar” and tell you quickly why I have no desire to read more. What they call scholarship is always in the service of the evangelical agenda. There is in fact no such thing as “conservative” biblical scholarship, any more than there is something called “liberal” biblical scholarship. Scholarship is by definition neither liberal nor conservative, it is, rather, competent or incompetent. The nature of scholarship is to go wherever the search for truth leads; it does not exist to buttress pre-conceived evangelical conclusions. That is to confuse both education and scholarship with propaganda. Most of the evangelical “scholars” that these two gentlemen cited are unknown in the academic circles I inhabit not, as they claim, because of a liberal bias but because their work is not regarded as academic at all. It, therefore, stands at odds with the great tradition of biblical scholarship that broke upon the Western world in the late 18th century, and that continues to challenge, deeply and successfully, the literal assumptions made by most evangelicals. When Dr. Mohler asserted in our debate, “that every word of the Bible is the inerrant word of God,” it was obvious that this critical work of the last 200 years has never engaged his mind. The inerrancy he claimed for “the Word of God” requires one to live in a pre-Copernican, pre-Darwinian world. To pretend that the earth is still the center of the universe is simply no longer credible. Old Testament narratives from the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis, to the story of manna raining down from heaven on the Israelites in the wilderness reflect that now-rejected world view, as do the New Testament accounts of a star being dragged across the heavens slowly enough to allow wise men to keep up with it and Jesus returning to God by ascending into the sky. DNA evidence also makes the idea of a separate creation for human life laughable. The people who wrote the Bible, knew nothing about germs, viruses or tumors, and assumed that sickness was punishment for sinfulness, that epilepsy resulted from demon possession and deaf muteness derived from the devil tying the victim’s tongue. One does not want to attribute such ignorance to God. Furthermore, evangelicals do not face the fact that a book which says quite literally that homosexuals should be put to death, women are inferior to men, slavery is legitimate or Jews deserve God’s wrath, should never be called “the Word of God.”
When Dr. Craig proclaimed that the gospels were “biographies of Jesus,” reflecting “eye witness accounts that go back into the first decade following the life of Jesus,” it was apparent that he was either unaware of or had deliberately rejected the conclusions of two centuries of biblical studies. Then he stated that the Book of Acts was written in the early sixties, a date reputable scholars find incredible. To debate such ideas as if they are competent is like debating with members of the flat earth society. It is universally attested today that Acts is volume two of Luke and that Luke has copied into his gospel about fifty percent of the Gospel of Mark. If Dr. Craig were correct that would force us to date Luke and Mark early in the 50’s. Both gospels reflect a much later structure of church life and appear to be cognizant of such external events as the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., each of which makes Dr. Craig’s dating impossible.
I have no desire to impugn the integrity of either of these gentlemen, but I can say that their level of learning is at best naive. Like most evangelicals, they know much about the literal content of the Bible and can cite its proof texts with alacrity, but they seem to know nothing about the Bible’s formation, its clear conflicts, or anything else that threatens their primary presuppositions. Neither man understood a basic distinction, which is that while all people are welcome to their own opinions, none are welcome to their own facts. Facts can be tested. Evangelicals also do not seem to recognize that there is a time-honored method by which new thoughts enter the public debate. The one with the challenging insight writes a book or a paper and allows it to be circulated among those judged to be experts in that field so that they might react to it. If the insight opens new doors into truth it will ultimately win its way to acceptance. If it does not, it will receive the treatment it deserves and be roundly dismissed. Insights that are saluted only by evangelicals do not meet that test and all the rhetoric, designed to make credible that which has no academic merit, will avail nothing.
The major problem with those who read the Bible literally is that they do not understand how the world has changed since the Bible was written. Propositional statements made in any time frame reflect the worldview of the one speaking. Language is always a dialogue between truth and time. Ultimate truth may be timeless but all articulations of truth are time bound and time warped. That distinction is still foreign to the conservative religious mind.
My debating partners became quite contentious when trying to maintain their intellectually indefensible positions. Dr. Mohler revealed this by going into a full-scale attack. He suggested that I had rejected “every tenet of traditional Christianity.” He checked them off: the Virgin Birth, the blood atonement, the physical nature of the Resurrection, the supernatural God, and the reality of miracles. As he fired his fundamentalist artillery, he slipped quickly into character assassination. The oldest trick in debating is to attack the messenger when you can no longer deal with the message. What I do reject is not the basic ‘tenets of Christianity’ but the literal interpretations and dated world view that have been imposed on traditional Christianity by those who think they are ‘defending the faith.’ That is a distinction that those who identify Christianity with their own narrow definitions of it cannot make. Dr. Mohler’s assertions were almost identical with those things outlined by evangelicals in a series of early 20th century tracts called “The Fundamentals,” every one of which has been dismissed by the academic world of Christian scholarship. No scholar of world rank today, treats the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke as literal biology, the resurrection as physical resuscitation or envisions God as a deity who requires a blood offering and a human sacrifice as the means of achieving salvation. Such literalizations have become nothing less than a source of Christian embarrassment.
Dr. Craig sought to distance himself from such strict fundamentalism by announcing that he was not an absolute literalist. When the Bible suggested that the hills clapped their hands, he explained, he did not believe that “hills actually had hands that could clap.” If that’s the mentality that tempers his literalism, he has a long way to go before he can enter the contemporary theological dialogue. His wife actually articulated the real problem at the end of the debate. I had related the story of how my evangelical church had taught me as a child that segregation, patriarchy, anti-Semitism and homophobia were the will of God, quoting the literal words of the Bible to ‘prove’ it. She expressed her sorrow “for the way I had been treated as a child by evangelicals.” If I had just had a wise and loving evangelical as my childhood pastor, perhaps someone like Dr. Craig, none of these dreadful things would have happened and, presumably, I would be a good evangelical today. I smiled inwardly, for clearly her comment revealed no insight at all into the things we had been discussing for two hours.
Christianity is in desperate need of reformation but dialogue with evangelicals is not the way to pursue that task. As the old love song suggests, ‘we live in two different worlds.’
~  John Shelby Spong

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