[Oe List ...] 11/18/2021, The Rev. Gretta Vosper: Catching Flight on the Wings of Thought; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Nov 18 06:32:37 PST 2021
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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv9066695891 #yiv9066695891templateBody .yiv9066695891mcnTextContent, #yiv9066695891 #yiv9066695891templateBody .yiv9066695891mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv9066695891 #yiv9066695891templateFooter .yiv9066695891mcnTextContent, #yiv9066695891 #yiv9066695891templateFooter .yiv9066695891mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} The Legacy of Bishop John Shelby Spong
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Catching Flight on the Wings of Thought
The Legacy of Bishop John Shelby Spong
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| Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper
November 18, 2021The number of people whose death would be felt around the world is limited. Bishop John Shelby Spong was surely one of them. So many met his gracious and brave spirit through his books, lectures, and travels, and so many more - influenced second- and third-hand - as his thoughts were shared beyond those direct experiences. It is impossible to determine how far or wide his influence has and will continue to be.
The Measure of Thought
My partner reads a lot of philosophy. Mostly, he keeps it to himself, for which I am, mostly, grateful. But every now and then, he’ll share something he finds intriguing or outrageous, and explains it to me well enough that I am able to share in his intrigue or outrage.
This past week, he read something about the line of thought that argues that nothing is really real unless it can be measured in some manner by human instrument. That might not be accurate, but it was my takeaway and got me thinking: How on earth do we measure ideas? How can a concept be huge, wide-ranging, life-changing if it really has no substance? I’m sure some of you might be able to answer that but for the purposes of this tribute to my mentor and friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, I’m running with the idea that thought is one of the most powerful things we have, even if it remains forever immeasurable.
The Measure of Legacy
Similarly, how do we measure legacy? Often, the word refers solely to material possessions passed on to heirs or organizations after an individual’s death. It can be easily calculated. But for those of us who truck in the business of ideas and the ethereal, legacy is much more difficult to measure. Indeed, when we are influencers, as Bishop Spong certainly was, ideas can travel far and wide, morph and grow as they are met with enthusiasm or opposition, and traverse borders or generations through a single conversation. Once past lip or pen, ideas have a life of their own. Measuring their legacy becomes impossible.
Church
Anyone sitting in church is the beneficiary of legacies of thought that reach back through generations to their original sources, most of which are obscured regardless of efforts to expose them. Some return to church week after week to feel the familiarity of the liturgy and the comfort of faces known and friends long-loved. Others drop in from time to time, scheduling their appearances around contemporary society’s refusal of the quaint idea of a day of rest. Many “darken the door” rarely, if at all, either because they have been generationally removed from the idea of church or because they are impatient with its seeming refusal to address their needs or concerns.
Bishop Spong was comfortable with each of these groups but he may be significantly responsible for the last one: those who find attending church an exercise in frustration and mind-numbing brought about by its use of archaic language, unsupportable doctrine and meaningless ritual, and it failing entirely to fulfill one of its most urgent roles: to edify and convict its members by placing them within a context of wisdom, beauty, and awe.
Are We There Yet?
Perhaps one of the most generous elements of Bishop Spong’s work was his encouragement and support of those leaders, including me, who found ourselves leading within contexts that were somewhere along the spectrum made possible by his thought.
On the one end, we are burning to share Bishop Spong’s progressive interpretations of the faith but are pressured or even bullied by parishioners or church councils to keep it to ourselves or risk dismissal. Our office bookshelves are laden with lectionary guides to worship, contemporary biblical commentaries and concordances, and maybe even a Greek or Hebrew interlinear bible. But our home libraries and bookmarked websites, away from the eyes of our parishioners, explore the very different, pot-holed road of our personal faith stories.
We may have found a pulpit where we can preach openly about contemporary issues, framing them with Christian beliefs as they evolved into the mid-20th century. But we don’t dare toy with any of the other elements of the service; hymns, prayers of confession, petition, and intercession. I have yet to meet a clergy person dismissed for ineffectual prayer; parishioners suffer from disease and die regardless of our efforts, but those of us who pray for such miracles on Sunday mornings and at the bedsides of the sick and dying, are legion.
We may be fortunate enough to be called to a congregation with a strong studying community that is eager to continue the journey of progressive Christian thought. On weekday evenings, members boldly toss out most of what they’ve been taught about Christian doctrine and revel in their exploration of the “heretical”. Sunday mornings become less important for them than the faith discussions that take place in their study group, so much so that often they stop attending services regularly, distilling the gathered worshippers into a more conservative set than might have otherwise evolved.
Or, like me, we find ourselves in a congregation with passionately progressive members who refuse to give up what they know for the comforts of others – a challenging reality. They choose the difficult road that leads them on in their journey, not losing sight of the elements that are crucial and meaningful, but with a creative spirit with which to recast them. These are the congregations with pews full of those who distilled from the traditional tenets of Christian faith and the ways it has been transmitted only those elements considered core, upon which any great religious or ethical belief system might have been or might yet be built. And because the work they allow, because of the intentionality of that work, they create space where believer and non-believer alike can flourish in their pursuit of wisdom, beauty, love, wonder, and right relationship.
Vision Forward
In 2004, I met Bishop Spong at the launch of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and my life changed. That same year, West Hill United Church, which I serve, completed its first VisionWorks document, an attempt to distill what it was upon which the congregation could build its ministry. I was involved in that first draft. But VisionWorks is revised every five years and I have not been involved in any subsequent versions.
This month, the congregation was introduced to the document’s fourth iteration, created by local, distance, and international members of the church. I can think of no other way to honour Bishop Spong’s legacy than to share this document. This is how far he encouraged me to go. This is how far we can all go. Because he spoke out. Because he embarked on the journey. Because his courage was a gift to us all. Because, with the gift of his thought, he invited us to fly.VisionWorks 2021
Copyright West Hill United Church, 2021
VisionWorks is an evolving document that articulates West Hill’s core values.
We use it to inspire, affirm, and guide us as individuals in community.
Grounded in life
Life: connections
With a deep sense of awe and wonder, we acknowledge life, in all its diversity and complexity, as an interconnected web of relationships beyond our full comprehension.
Life: experience
We recognize our place within this web of life: we are each affected by natural forces and human choices, and, in turn, have an impact on the natural world and the human community, helping or harming by our actions and inactions.
Life as source
>From these realities we draw our sense of identity and belonging, and form our views on humanity, meaning, and morality.
While we are aware of our limited perspectives and fallibility, we are also eager to discover, understand, and experience life.
Guided by love
Love in action: choice
In light of our interconnectedness in life, we choose love as our highest value and guide.
We take love to mean actions that embody justice, compassion, honesty, openness, integrity, courage, kindness, forgiveness…for self, others, and the planet.
Love in action: advocacy
Our choice of love leads us to acknowledge the worth of all beings, and therefore their right to be treated with dignity and respect.
We seek to increase our awareness of the places of hurt in the world and our sense of responsibility for the consequences of our actions and inactions.
We strive to promote justice, resist injustice, and bring about reconciliation.
Love in action: decisions
As we encounter ethical complexity, cultural diversity, and conflicting worldviews, we acknowledge inevitable uncertainty, seek a comprehensive understanding, and support one another in making choices in line with our values.
Love in action: interpersonal relationships
We strive to interact with one another in a caring, honest manner, expressing views respectfully, listening attentively, and responding with empathy.
We work toward consensus and creative conflict resolution, and in times of broken trust,
seek mutual understanding, forgiveness, and healing.
We meet to experience and contribute to community: we celebrate and commemorate life events, share joys, express concerns, develop relationships, study and challenge, engage in self-reflection, and commit to action.
Growing in wisdom
The pursuit of wisdom
In light of our interconnectedness in life and our choice of love as our guide, we strive to grow in wisdom for living.
We seek knowledge and insight that will deepen our understanding of our values and strengthen our commitment to them so that we may effectively apply them personally, locally, and globally.
Sources of wisdom
We seek wisdom in all historical eras, diverse cultures and traditions, and varied forms of expression, including word, music, art, dance, symbols, and silence.
No source is assumed to be inherently authoritative or to contain absolute or universal truth, nor is any source accorded a privileged status based on claims for its supernatural or transcendent origin. Love alone is our guide for discerning wisdom in any source.
We encourage one another to seek, interpret, and create meaning for ourselves, valuing exploration and questioning over the pursuit of certainty.
Sharing wisdom
We gain insight for living out our core values as we share diverse views, experiences, interpretations, and resources, and consider them together in light of
love for self, others, and the planet.
Conclusion
As we strive to live in these ways as individuals in community,
we often soar and often stumble;
yet in joy and sorrow, in certainty and doubt,
we travel together in a spirit of love. ~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
Read online here
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Donna
My cousin is pressuring me to become “Born Again.” She says that it’s the only way to guarantee not being punished in hell for all eternity. That seems like a pretty harsh consequence for not uttering what seems like “magic words.”
A: By Rev. David M. Felten
Dear Donna,Thanks for resisting the pressure. Many of us have been brow-beaten by some well-intentioned believer about the need to be "born again” – or else! Most of them, however, are doing it out of love and haven’t thought through the threatening implications. Unfortunately, all they’ve been taught is that to be “born again” is THE definition of being a Christian.
You’ve already identified the first problem with this approach: insisting that people be “born again” is not only a litmus test (a form of elitist legalism that clashes with Jesus’ sensibilities of grace and inclusivity), it can also be weaponized with threats of eternal condemnation. Regrettably, there’s a word for this kind of malevolent god and the people who follow this god: sadistic.
And what makes it all the more frustrating is these all-important “magic words” aren’t even in the Bible. People THINK these words appear in John 3 because early translators finessed the text and put the words “born again” into Jesus’ mouth. But if you consult the New Revised Standard Version, the Scholars Edition, or any translation that actually takes the text seriously, they simply don’t appear.
In a conversation Jesus is having with Nicodemus, Jesus says that no one can be a part of the program without being born “from above.” The Greek word John has Jesus use is anothen, or the “up place.” Nicodemus’ promptly makes the typical fundamentalist mistake of taking Jesus’ words literally instead of metaphorically and says, “Huh? What? Born a second time?!? I don’t get it!” Then Jesus has to explain it to him: “I’m talking about a re-orientation of your priorities and perspective.” So, as familiar and important as the King James version is to many Christians, Jesus simply doesn’t say you have to be “born again.” It’s not what the Greek says – and misses Jesus’ more subtle point.
Sadly, today there’s a whole theological industrial complex built up around the phrase “born again” and all its attendant dogmatic expectations and implications. For those still publishing the King James Version and other Bibles used in Evangelical-leaning churches, literary accuracy simply doesn't matter. Their client base has too much invested in the phrase, “born again," so they leave it in. Some publishers have enough integrity to include an asterisk with the footnote, “actually, it’s born ‘from above’,” but not all.
I’m not so naïve to think that any conversation with your cousin would change her mind, but for your own sake, let me offer you some assurance that Jesus’ alternative of being born “from above” promotes a totally different (and I’d argue, healthier) spirituality. Being born “from above” suggests that the source of wholeness, that which guides your direction and purpose, is something beyond legalistic rules or “magic words.” It's relational, dynamic, and, if we’re lucky, part of a life-long journey. It’s not a static, one-off event like being “born again.” Later in the same passage, Jesus says to Nicodemus: "The spirit blows every which way, like wind: you hear the sound it makes but you can't tell where it is coming from or where it's headed. That's how it is with everyone reborn of the spirit.”
What Jesus had in mind was not an incantation of “magic words” one has to speak in order to be inoculated from some fantasy eternal damnation. It’s a process. It’s a journey. And I wish you well on yours.
Hope this helps!
~ Rev. David M. Felten
PS: For more on this same topic, you could refer your cousin to a recent message I preached on the dangers of being “being born again”.
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. David M. Felten is a full-time pastor at The Fountains, a United Methodist Church in Fountain Hills, Arizona. David and fellow United Methodist Pastor, Jeff Procter-Murphy, are the creators of the DVD-based discussion series for Progressive Christians, “Living the Questions” and authors of Living the Questions: The Wisdom of Progressive Christianity. A co-founder of Catalyst Arizona and also a founding member of No Longer Silent: Clergy for Justice, David is an outspoken voice for LGBTQ rights both in the church and in the community at large. David is active in the Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church and tries to stay connected to his roots as a musician. You’ll find him playing saxophones in a variety of settings, including appearances with the Fountain Hills Saxophone Quartet. David is the proud father of three reliably remarkable human beings. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Lecture Tour of Germany
Part I: Background and Content
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
July 14, 2011Earlier this summer as part of a European lecture tour, Christine and I went to Germany for three public lectures in three cities and two press interviews. The invitation to include Germany on this trip came from a retired Lutheran pastor named Gerhard Klein, who has translated four of my books into German, which have now been published there by Patmos Press in cooperation with my publisher HarperCollins. Through these books and these lectures, I am able to enter the theological conversation now taking place in Germany, primarily in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, but also touching the issues roiling within German Roman Catholicism, which are fueled in part by the response to the German Pope, Benedict XVI. The story of how Gerhard Klein became aware of me and of my work reveals the power of chance happenings.
For a number of years Gerhard Klein served as the founding pastor of an Evangelical Lutheran congregation in Melbourne, Australia. There he perfected his English and pursued his own ever-questing theological journey. This man had grown up in Germany under the Hitler regime. He was eight years old when World War II began with the German invasion of Poland in September of 1939. Gerhard was torn, as many Germans were, by the inner conflict between his love for his homeland and his vigorous opposition to Nazism and, in particular, his revulsion over the treatment of the Jews. He felt deeply compromised by either the unwillingness or the inability of the two primary Christian bodies in Germany to stand up to Hitler’s abuse of power. His own Lutheran Church was essentially co-opted by the Nazis, while the Roman Catholic Church, under the primacy of Pope Pius XII was, depending on which version of history one reads, either an active supporter of Hitler or one who turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Nazi regime. The fact that the Roman Catholic Church is today still pressing forward with the process that leads ultimately to the beatification of Pius XII is deeply disturbing to many Germans who know of the role this man played in the rise of Nazi atrocities. For Gerhard it was the presence of a single ordained Lutheran leader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who made the crucial difference. Bonhoeffer, as a pastor, became publicly involved in the resistance movement and thus was for Gerhard the sole witness that Christianity still had integrity. Bonhoeffer had written a book entitled “The Cost of Discipleship” and he had paid that cost. Following Jesus for Bonhoeffer ultimately meant a willingness to participate in a plot to assassinate Hitler. When the plot failed, he was captured, arrested, convicted and ultimately hanged by the Nazis in 1945 at a prison camp in Flossenburg just two weeks before that camp was overtaken by the Allied army.
Before his execution Bonhoeffer engaged in an extensive correspondence with a friend named Eberhard Bethge, who preserved his letters and published them after the war under the title Letters and Papers from Prison. In these letters Bonhoeffer spelled out his vision of a post-war Christian future. It was thus through those letters that Gerhard Klein felt his own call, not only to ordained ministry in general, but to the stance of giving birth to the radically-reformed Christianity that Bonhoeffer had envisioned. In one of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison, he had speculated on what Christianity might look like once it had separated itself from the confines of organized religion, which in his opinion had been mortally wounded by the rise of scientific knowledge and morally compromised by its failure to stand up for the Jews. It was Bonhoeffer who coined the phrase “Religionless Christianity” and began to talk about the God beyond religion. Those were the things that had inspired Gerhard, just as they had inspired me.
Near the end of Gerhard’s service with his church in Australia he happened to be watching the news on television when I was being interviewed. It was in 2003 and I was on a book tour of Australia with my book Why Christianity Must Change or Die. I have always received maximum media attention in Australia because the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Sydney is dominated by the most out of date fundamentalist mentality one can imagine. Not only do they refuse to ordain women, they will not ordain an unmarried man for fear that he might be gay! These prejudices are regularly supported by appeals to the literally understood Bible. Whenever I travel to Australia the Sydney Anglicans denounce my arrival as if the Anti-Christ were about to land. The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jenson, states publicly that I am not welcome in any of the Anglican churches in his diocese as if I actually wanted to go to one of them. Their diocesan newspaper, “The Southern Cross,” runs articles designed to arm its readers to be able to resist the appeal of this American infidel. In the past they have even appointed a “Truth Squad” to follow me around New South Wales in order to straighten out the people who might be “confused” by my words! With that kind of free publicity, Harper-Collins, Australia, has no trouble getting extensive media coverage for my visits. So it was that an Archdiocese of Sydney-inspired television interview was the catalyst for bringing me and my work to the attention of Gerhard Klein.
On this television interview, Gerhard heard me articulating thoughts he himself held, but had not yet publicly expressed. He felt an intense need to learn more about this American bishop, who was at that time unknown to him. He began to read my books and that in turn led him to the determination to translate these books into his native German. Returning to his homeland, Gerhard has over the last decade or so done that on four separate volumes.
Five years ago, while we were lecturing in the United Kingdom and France, we accepted Gerhard’s invitation to spend a few days with him in private conversation at his home in Grebenstein. It was a wonderful meeting and the beginning of a very deep friendship. He became almost like a brother to me and was certainly a theological partner in our common effort to call the Christianity, to which we were both committed, into a new reformation. As a direct result of that visit, this year’s lecture tour of Germany was organized.
Germany’s role in the development of Christianity in the Western World has always intrigued me. This is the country, above all others, that has given us critical biblical scholarship and relevant theological thinking. It was a German biblical scholar named David Friedrich Strauss whose book, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, published in 1835, that first introduced critical biblical scholarship to the Western World. Strauss, a professor at the University of Tubingen, was 27 years old when he wrote this monumental book. For his efforts he was fired from the faculty at Tubingen and banished from the academy across Europe. Later, in that same century, it was two German scripture scholars, Julian Wellhausen and Karl Heinrich Graf, who cracked the code to the source theory of the Torah that is still today the basis for the study of the Old Testament. Germany was clearly the leader in developing modern biblical scholarship.
That was also true in the field of Theology. It was a German named Karl Barth, who first called Christianity out of its 19th century liberalism, which had been best articulated by another German, Friedrich Schleiermacher. Barth became the father of what came to be called Neo-Orthodoxy that dominated Protestantism during the first half of the 20th century. That emphasis was then succeeded by a series of German scholars, who wrestled with re-stating the Christian faith in the light of the knowledge of today’s world. One thinks of such names as Emil Bruner, Rudolf Bultman, Paul Tillich and the aforementioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
My own theological debt to German scholarship is immense. Paul Tillich who escaped Nazi Germany to enjoy a spectacular career at both Union Theological Seminary in New York City and Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, shaped my thinking more substantially than any other theologian. Rudolf Bultman, probably the 20th century’s leading New Testament scholar, shaped my biblical understanding more than any other. Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught me, as few others could have done, that standing for truth has consequences and if you are not willing to pay that price or run that risk, nothing you do will ever be worthwhile. Finally there were the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and Richard, who, while being American, were the children of German immigrants, who shaped my understanding of the social demands for justice that must be part of the Christian faith. My own mentor and friend, John A. T. Robinson, who sounded the clarion call for post-religious Christianity in a ground breaking book entitled Honest to God was primarily popularizing the thought of Tillich, Bultman and Bonhoeffer, and in that process, he initiated a new debate in the Christian world. So, I felt an enormous indebtedness to German scholarship and was filled with gratitude for this opportunity.
The tour began in Grebenstein where Gerhard lives. The first lecture was attended primarily by friends specifically invited by Gerhard. They were generally professional people not clergy or theologians. They gave me a sense of the current state of German Church life. God for most educated Germans, not unlike their counterparts in other Western nations, is still an external being, equipped with supernatural power and able to invade this world to answer prayers or impose the divine will. That deity has become not only irrelevant in modern life but also unbelievable for modern minds. So to analyze why “Christianity must Change or Die” or to spell out what a “New Christianity for a New World” might look like became my agenda on this tour. I laid the groundwork for that task with this gathering of Gerhard’s friends and professional colleagues. It was a good place to begin.
In Parts II and III of this series, I will describe the tour in detail and the reaction to it. So stay tuned.~ John Shelby Spong |
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