[Dialogue] 1/11/18, Spong; Unbelievable: Part II; Spong revisited

Thu Jan 11 09:53:36 PST 2018

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Unbelievable: Part II
John Shelby Spong

 Unbelievable began its life years ago when my daughter, Jaquelin, who owns a Ph.D. degree in physics from Stanford University said to me: “Dad, the questions the church keeps trying to answer we don’t even ask anymore!” She was not hostile. It was just a matter of fact statement. The church keeps posing issues that the secular world has settled, or at least has decided to ignore. Questions such as: Who or what is God? What does original sin mean? What does it mean to say that Jesus died for my sins? Can one really believe in life after death? What does it mean to be born again? Why do we not try to grow up?
Being a bishop in the service of this institution, I have come to the conclusion that the church in large measure is dishonest. The church spends its time pretending. We have been living in that dishonesty for so long that we get very angry when someone in the church raises this issue to consciousness by saying things which most people simply do not believe. That is to treat it like it’s a scandal. The symbols of this issue are surprisingly obvious to any casual observer. Take the Christmas story for example. For a Christian to say that the virgin birth not only assumes that women do not have egg cells, which no one knew existed in the first century, but that it violates every rule of biology that we believe in the 21st century. Yet to say that the Virgin Birth is unbelievable creates a storm while the underlying details of that story are simply ignored. How many people today believe that a star, which is a mass of burning gas, can announce a human event? How many think stars are equipped with a GPS system that can guide seekers to their destination, which turns out to be a house in the “little town of Bethlehem?” That familiar story also assumes that ancient star gazers, called wise men, kept a set of camels at the ready to make a journey to where the messiah would be born, or a goodly supply of gold, frankincense and myrrh, so that they could bring him gifts. All of those details were late developing additions added to the Jesus story after the fact. By the time, those stories became part of the mythology, probably in the ninth decade, the messiah had become a supernatural person capable of doing miraculous acts, accepting death as his due, being restored to life from the dead on the third day and then ascending into the heavens of a three-tiered universe. It is story familiar to us all, but it is unbelievable! We could make the same analysis on any of the other stories of the New Testament.
We are driven by these facts to look at history. Christianity was born in the 1st century. Jesus of Nazareth was born at that time. When people began to explain the experience they had with him, they inevitably did so in terms of the world they inhabited. It was a world in which God was a being living above the sky watching over the world. When God wanted to enter the consciousness of human lives, God simply came down to earth from his heavenly home. Do we really still believe that? In time the answer was a direct “No.” We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. They obliterated God’s home above the sky. We are space age people, a post Hubble telescope generation. Our universe is made up of infinite space filled with galaxies of stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is so large that it would take light, traveling at the approximate speed of 186,000 miles per second, 100,000 years to navigate the distance from one end of our galaxy to the other. Our galaxy is, we now know, only one of literally billions, if not trillions, of other galaxies in the almost unembraceable size of the universe. There is no dwelling place for God above the sky. God has been rendered homeless for almost 600 years. That was the first step in the breakdown of the religious symbols.
We also live on the other side of Isaac Newton, who perceived the mathematically precise order in the universe. In Newton’s world there was no room for miracle or magic. God could not accomplish a rescue, control the weather or affect a cure. For Newton the familiar religious jargon no longer fit. God, with no further work to do, became unemployed.
Then there was the 19th century onslaught of Charles Darwin’s thought, who proclaimed that human life was not different in kind from any other forms of life. We could no longer say that human life was special, made in the image of God, or “a little lower than the angels.” Human life had become a product of chance — “a little higher than the apes.”
Next came Sigmund Freud, who discovered the unconscious and forced us to embrace its meaning. Then came Albert Einstein, who established the fact that time and space are both inside creation and all of our experience is relative to this world. There is no objectivity and eternal truth was a myth.
>From the time of Copernicus to the time of Einstein the forces of life have killed off all of our pre-modern concepts. We have been forced to embrace the thought of a post-modern world. Since we have no pre-modern concepts left, we ask the post-modern questions: What do we mean when we say “Our Father who art in heaven” in 2018? Do we really believe our old religious formulas? Is the church participating in a giant hoax? Is there any real hope for the institution we call the church? That institution seems to be living well beyond its shelf-life.
In the 16th century the church, feeling the insights of this new modern world, undertook a great reformation. The reformation, however, made no lasting difference. The Christian Church, both Catholic and Protestant, changed very little keeping the same Bible, creeds and liturgical forms taken as they were from the 1st, 4th and 13th centuries. The Reformation caused great upheaval, but all people talked about was authority and order, not substance. We fought the Thirty Years War with both sides trying to impose its religion on the other. The Spanish Armada was Catholic Spain’s way to force Protestant England back into the old pattern. When that reformation had run its course, the church kept repeating the formulas of the past, too little and too late. Generations later the need for reformation is still desperately apparent.
So here we are in 2018. The big issues that divide us are not being discussed publicly. We continue to do the ancient dance with pomp and circumstance, convinced that we will find meaning there. The church is dying. The pace is accelerating and no one dares to lift a voice to find a new way to talk about God. As Edna St. Vincent Millay notes in her book Conversations at Midnight: “God is dead and modern man and women gather around the divine grave and weep.” We can pretend no longer.
That is the background that I assume in this book. Is it possible for us to find a radical new way to articulate what faith means today? Can we separate the first century experience of Jesus from the unbelievable mythology that has engulfed his life and his words? That is our challenge. I am a believer without the words to express that belief, so I ask questions: Can I still be a theist? Is my only alternative to theism to be an a-theist? Is God a being, even the Supreme Being? Or is God an experience in whom we live? What is the role of Jesus? Is he a savior? From what then does he save us? It cannot be from a fall that victimized all human life. There was no perfect creation from which all have fallen, so we cannot fall from a perfection we have never possessed. Or is there another way we can speak of Christ? -How about, if not a savior, then as a as a barrier-breaker? When our world presents us with the need to transcend our differences, does Jesus call us so deeply into a humanity that is beyond tribe, national identity, gender differences or sexual orientation? Is that a new humanity for which we are destined, a new oneness inside God? Is God still a noun we hope to define or is God a verb in whom we are called to live? Do interfaith understandings start where religion ends?
There is no future for the Christianity of the present, nor is there any future in a return to the security of the past. The only way forward is to embrace a new reformed Christianity for a new world. I still define myself as a Christian, a believer, perhaps even a mystic. In this book I will spell out this new vision. It is beyond anything we call Christian today. The traditionally religious will dismiss it. It will create too large a sense of insecurity for them. The minority of believers, however, who know that there is no future in the church for them, will see that it is “change or die.” There is no place else to go but into a radically changed future, not back to the security systems of the past. There must be a whole new way toward a faith that is beyond sin and salvation, but opening to a great new vision. The choice will be clear — either a new telling of the Jesus story or the death of God. In this book I will vote to try to break the log-jam – something beyond religion, but not beyond God. I have tried to create that faith in this world. When this reformation is complete I am convinced that people will judge my work not as too radical, but as not nearly radical enough. I offer a new path. I hope some of you will claim it – a mystical Christ, free of the guilt and judgment of the past, but drawing the whole world to himself, with a promise of life. It will call us all into the meaning of life: “to live fully, to love wastefully, and to be all that each of us can be. It will be an affirmation of life, not an escape from fear. That is finally the path that Jesus lived that drew the world to him before he was surrounded with the mythical claims of the past. Let the reformation begin!
~ John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.

An Endorsement From The United Kingdom
If you choose just one book of John Shelby Spong’s then choose Unbelievable. This final book is not only a summation of his life’s teaching, but a contemporary catechism that addresses the real questions and profound hesitations that contemporary women and men really do have about Christianity. Put another way, it provides in one volume the basis for a new reformation for all those who have left the church in despair or who will never darken its doors because of the intellectual non-sense and constricted life that are perceived to be required by its followers. Here is something different that asks us not to check our brains at the door, but to think deeply, “to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we can be.”
Peter Francis, Warden
The Gladstone Library
The United Kingdom
……

Question & Answer
Joy from the Internet, asks:

Question:
There is a lot of political discussion these days about resisting Trump and other politicians that don’t seem to reflect the ways of Jesus. What do you think Jesus would do?

Answer: By Eric Alexander

Dear Joy,
Very interesting question Joy. In my study of the ministry of Jesus, he seemed to be highly focused on what he desired, and not as much on what he didn’t want. The only times he tangled with the opposition was when they confronted him, or when he was telling a parable, or when he was defending a sick or oppressed person. His message was one of a fresh vision and an inspired path forward. And I think we can learn a lot from that. I would posit that Jesus would be talking a lot more about his own vision right now for spiritual and social sanity, and not mentioning Trump or the Republicans very much at all. But I must also caveat that this is only my opinion, and of course we can never know what anyone would do, much less the enigmatic Jesus of Nazareth.
My own personal view on your question parallels a saying that is often attributed to Socrates, “the secret of change is to not focus all your energy on fighting the old, but instead on building the new.” I think those who oppose Trump should be talking about why they are a better option right now, and not just reacting and resisting. Clear vision beats resistance every time.
So although I like the “resist” slogan, and I appreciate the point of it in a tactical sense, I tend to think Jesus would lean more toward what John Lennon said … “Imagine.”
I think the most successful politicians, parties, and policies of tomorrow are not going to be those that focus so much on resisting the other person or party, but rather those which are focused on building a better thing and inspiring others toward it. It will be won by those who can most effectively rally people toward a more hopeful vision of how the world can be. And therefore the resistance will just come naturally by default, because people will be inspired in a different direction.
~ Eric Alexander
Read and share online here
About the Author
Eric Alexander is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a board member at ProgressiveChristianity.org, and is the founder of Jesism, Christian Evolution, and the Progressive Christianity and Politics group on Facebook. Eric holds a Master of Theology from Saint Leo University and studied negotiations at Harvard Law School, and and is author of Teaching Kids Life IS Good.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Weeping Over the Grave of God 
Part III of a series about the Tsunami

"If God is God, he is not good! If God is good, he is not God!" These words, from a 20th century adaptation of the Book of Job entitled "J.B.", were written by Archibald McLeish.
"God no longer has any work to do." A quotation from Michael Donald Goulder, Professor of New Testament Studies at the United Kingdom's University of Birmingham, when he announced in 1981 that he had become a "non-aggressive atheist."
Both the dramatist McLeish and the biblical theologian Goulder were stating that they no longer find significant meaning in the traditional way of understanding God. If God is a Being, supernatural in power, living somewhere external to this world, who invades this world periodically to answer their prayers, to accomplish the divine will, or to protect them from peril or their enemies, then God has, to these two gentlemen, become inoperative. They will no longer share in this human illusion. If there is nothing more to God than this, then they will choose to be atheists. They have articulated the religious crisis of our time. Unwillingness to believe in this theistic God seems to leave us with but the single option of embracing atheism. The theistic God, because of the great advances in human knowledge, has been rendered unbelievable. A natural catastrophe like the Tsunami brings these issues dramatically and urgently into full view.
The defenders of the traditional understanding of God try to make sense out of this tragedy by postulating a deserving guilt on the part of its victims or by telling us that the will of God in this tragedy will be made clear in time. These arguments are simply not convincing.
Let me, as a believing Christian, say it bluntly: the skies are empty. There is no supernatural parent figure waiting to come to our aid or to answer our prayers. The God, quoted as the final source of all authority, is no more. When we recognize these dimensions of our spiritual crisis, then much of the human behavior observable today becomes comprehensible.
Those in our world who are emotionally capable of laying aside the now outdated religious explanations of antiquity are called 'secular humanists.' They come in two varieties: some are stoical humanists who work for the common good and who are willing to serve the whole society. In them we see that idealism is not dead. Others, driven by their deep survival instincts, become corrupt, grasping specimens of humanity, looking out for themselves alone. If the judging God is gone, they reason, so is the ethical system that purported to reflect the will of God. They recognize no binding ethic so long as they do not get caught. They give us the Enrons, the WorldComs and the politics of greed that mark our recent history.
Those on the other hand, who are not capable of living without the security of their religious myths of antiquity, become the fundamentalists and the religious fanatics of out time. They vigorously deny their doubts and fears, and cover their insecurity by seeking to impose their particular form of religion on all others. Examples of this mentality abound in acts of terror and in the religious imperialism that we now observe in our own elections. Neither alternative offers much hope for the future. We cannot return to yesterday. We must enter the world that is being born before our eyes and engage the faith crisis of modernity.
It was a Greek philosopher named Xenophanes, who wrote: "If horses had gods, they would look like horses." This was his way of urging us to recognize that the gods of human beings also and inevitably will look like human beings. Human beings are finite and mortal so we envision God as infinite and immortal. We are limited in knowledge, so God is omniscient. We are bound to a single place but God is omnipresent. We are limited in power, but God is omnipotent. We account for this similarity between God and ourselves by proclaiming that we were created in God's image. However, the reality is that God has been made in our image. If that is true, as it so obviously is, then perhaps it is not God but our very inadequate image of God that has died. That should be welcomed insight, for any God who can be killed ought to be killed. So the first step in building a new, authentic way to think about God is to cease trying to keep yesterday's image of God alive. Divine artificial respiration is a waste of time.
We understand this rationally, but the uniqueness of self-conscious humanity is to tremble at the vastness of space and our smallness in the scheme of things. That is why we invented the parent God in the first place. We needed a sense of divine security. We would rather be 'born again' into a continued child-like dependency than to be forced to grow up and take responsibility for ourselves. It was the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who urged us to separate God from religion. "God would have us know," he said, "that we must live as those who manage our lives without God." That is quite a challenge but that is where we are today.
Much of western religion has been predicated on a definition of human weakness. We have portrayed ourselves religiously as broken, inadequate and fallen. Our angst has created in us a need to denigrate ourselves. For centuries the church taught us that God's greatness could best be seen in response to human depravity, exhorting us to gratitude for the "amazing grace that saved a wretch like me." We are told "there is no health in us" and "we are not worthy to gather up the crumbs" from the divine table. The first step in the quest to build an authentic spirituality is to banish this negativity and recognize how incredible human life really is or can be.
When human life first emerged into self-consciousness, a creature had finally evolved who was not bound by time and space. Our minds can soar beyond our boundaries. We live inside the flow of time remembering a past that is no more, and anticipating the future that is not yet. We know something about the life force that surges within us. We recognize the power of love that enhances our life. We are aware that we can receive love, and once received we can give love away, but none of us can originate love. Love is a power that flows into us from beyond ourselves. We contemplate what it means to be unique. We have both a sense of who we are and a vision of who we want to be, which is the source of our discontent. These are the authentic parts of a God experience, which no other creature can share. Yes, we have created our image of God, that miracle working supernatural one, but we are not the authors of our experience of God. God is the name of the life within us that opens us to the miracle of transcendence. God is the name of love that comes to us from beyond ourselves. God is the ground or source of being out of which our own sense of being has emerged. Those are the moments when we discover oneness, embrace eternity and know why it is that we call ourselves spiritual beings.
What a difference this new angle of vision makes. Instead of seeing God as our judge eliciting our guilt, we begin to see God as the source of our empowerment. Instead of seeing Jesus as a divine visitor who came to rescue sinful humanity, we see him as the fully human one inviting us into his divinity, which is nothing but humanity transformed by wholeness. Instead of seeing the Holy Spirit as the source of our piety, we see Spirit as the source of expanding life. Instead of blaming God for tragedy and pain, or seeking to exonerate God from blame in an unjust universe; we accept our responsibility for building a world where every person has a better chance to live, to love and to be all that each of us is capable of being. We will use our intelligence and our ingenuity not to defend our dying God images, but to understand our world so deeply that we, not some distant mythical God, can be the needed bulwark against the natural fury of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and drought. Instead of being angry when we are victimized by evil or destruction that we cannot control, we will work together to build a safer world. Instead of seeing ethics as following some divinely established rules to please a parent God and avoid punishing wrath, we will learn to see goodness as those actions that enhance life making all of us more fully human. This means that we will also see evil as those actions which diminish our humanity making us more willing to hate than to love, more able to destroy than to build up. Instead of seeing life after death as a time to receive divine reward or punishment we will see it as humanity merging into divinity, and finitude entering into eternity.
This coming new spirituality will not promise us security, but it will give us the ability to live in a radically insecure world with hope and meaning. It will not promise reward to entice our self-centeredness, but it will invite us to risk discovering both life's heights and depths. It will not mean that our lives are safe, but it will mean that we do not die without meaning, without communing with that which is finally real. That is where God is found for me. Someday we will recognize that the God of our past could only be God for the weak and the lost, one who could only win our loyalty by keeping us in a state of emotional childishness. Perhaps the crisis in faith through which we are going today is nothing but the adolescent pangs of a new maturity being born. Surely the God of the past must die if this new day is to arrive.
Is this enough to make us capable of living in this frightening world? Do we not still need a supernatural protective Being out there somewhere? That is the question that each of us must answer. If we are still emotional children who need a protective parent, we will continue to create whatever illusions we require to survive and we will try to force all people into our religious mold. If on the other hand we are ready to grasp a new maturity and become a new creation, then we will find in this moment in history a freeing and awesome call to be the God bearers in this world, the co-creators of life; and we will eagerly enter the next stage of our human development. It is my hope that this will be the conclusion and the vocation to which the tragic earthquake and the terrifying tsunami will finally drive our world.
~ John Shelby Spong
Originally posted January 19, 2005

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