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Thoughts on Baptizing Chapman Thomas Brinegar
This past summer in a lovely chapel quite literally on the coast of Maine, I had the pleasure of baptizing Chapman Thomas Brinegar. A baptism is something I hardly ever do as a bishop, but this baby was the son of very close friends, making my participation in it possible. I used the baptismal liturgy of the Episcopal Church from the prayer book of 1979, which contained some rather harsh and, I believe, inappropriate words to apply to a beautiful newborn baby. Its words were not as harsh as those in the baptismal service in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. There the baptismal candidate was asked to renounce “the world, the flesh and the devil” before being baptized, making it appear that only by becoming a monk or a nun could one’s baptismal vows be kept. Our 1979 baptismal liturgy is a little better, but it still focuses on the baby’s “sin.” We pray for the child to be “delivered” from sin. We seem to assume that the child must be dirty for we pray that in baptism, the child might be “cleansed” from sin. I could not help but wonder as I read those words just what sin it was of which Chapman Brinegar was guilty. This baby is only eleven weeks old. He has never robbed a bank, told a lie, committed adultery, killed a person or displayed a prejudice, just to name some of the more notable sins.
So, why was this Christian liturgy so obsessed with sin? Yes, in fairness, we must say that Chapman, like all babies, is sometimes inconvenient, demanding, impatient and even insensitive to his parents’ needs. Someone once said that all babies are born with loud speakers at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other. None of these things, however, is culpable, or an expression of evil. Surely something else must be going on in human life that finds expression in the words of this baptismal liturgy.
I decided, therefore, to journey back into Christian history in search of the source of the idea that human life, including the newly born, is intrinsically evil. Since I could not find this note in the gospels, I went to the 4th century, the time in which the creeds were formed. There I found in the people of the church an obsession with evil. The Christian story was told as God’s rescue operation, designed to save human life, afflicted with something that was called “original sin.” “Original sin” seemed to be a universal, inescapable, all pervading aspect of all humanity. This sense of our inevitably sinful human lives was based on a picture of our original perfect creation. The “fathers” of the church, especially Augustine, treated the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were the literal words of God. Chapter one of this book described a divine creation, in which all that God had made was pronounced to be good. Originally, it said, human beings bore the image of God. Chapter two of the “word of God” then described how this perfect creation had been broken and how the “image of God” in us had been destroyed. It was through human disobedience we were told that we had become “fallen creatures” incapable of saving ourselves.
With that as our understanding of human life, we proceeded to tell the Christ story as the cure for our sinfulness. Jesus was God’s rescue operation. That is why our favorite titles for Jesus historically have been “savior,” “rescuer” and “redeemer.” He saves us from our sins, rescues us from the fall and redeems us by restoring our lost value.
When we ask just how it was that Jesus accomplished this rescue operation, the story gets even stranger. Our traditional answer is: “He died for our sins.” When we ask who it was that required this death, the typical answer has been “God!” Is that not a weird idea? Is God not capable of forgiveness? Does God require a human sacrifice and a blood offering before God can extend forgiveness to us? If the “father” God requires the death of the divine Son to pay the price of your sins or mine, does God not become the ultimate child abuser? Does that not turn God into a monster who is no longer worthy of our worship?
If Jesus “died for my sins” are we not saying that your sins and mine were the reason that Jesus had to be crucified? Does that not make us “Christ Killers” turning Jesus into one who loves to suffer? Was he a masochist? Is that not an ultimate guilt message? So we ask: “What kind of religion have we created that turns God into a monster, Jesus into a masochist and you and me into guilt-filled creatures?” Is anyone ever helped by being told how bad they are?
Then we notice that what we Christians say about babies in our baptismal liturgy, we also say about adults in our traditional Sunday worship. The idea of human sinfulness permeates traditional Christianity. Look at the words used in our churches on a typical Sunday. We call ourselves “miserable offenders.” We are told that “there is no health in us.” We say that our sinfulness is so great that “we are not worthy to gather up the crumbs” under the divine table. We are told to fall on our knees as beggars and over and over again to ask for mercy. “Lord, have mercy,” we cry. “Christ have mercy”, we plead. “Lord, have mercy,” we repeat. We shift to Greek and say three-fold Kyries and nine fold Kyries. In our prayers we say: “Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.” What kind of God is it who requires that we approach the Holy One on our knees, begging for mercy? A quaking child standing before an abusive parent might well ask for mercy. A convicted felon standing before a “hanging judge” might well pray for mercy, but is “Lord have mercy,” ever an appropriate prayer for a child of God to utter to the Source of our life, our love and our being? I do not think so and neither is the posture of kneeling, which is the position of a slave before a master, a serf before the lord of the manor and a beggar before the source of his or her next meal.
Yet these ideas and practices remain endemic in the way we engage the Christian story in worship. They make so little sense to modern, educated men and women. If this is what Christianity has become then, is there any wonder that those we call “the millenials” no longer have time in their lives for Christianity? The time has come, I believe, to declare that these traditional ideas and practices are based on a false premise. They are not true. They need to be abandoned. Christianity must evolve into something other than this or it is doomed.
We now know that the stories in Genesis 1 and 2 were not originally related to each other. Indeed Genesis 1 was written some 500 years after Genesis 2. The perfect creation was not followed by the act of disobedience. “Original sin” is not true, even metaphorically. We live on the other side of Charles Darwin and Darwin’s version of the origins of the world and of human life is vastly different. Whether traditional Christians like it or not, Darwin has won this battle. Every scientist assumes the truth of Darwin and every medical school in the world operates on Darwinian principles. In Darwin’s view of our origins there was no original perfection. The universe was born in an explosion of matter, euphemistically called “the big bang,” about 13.7 billion years ago. Life entered this universe, so far as we now know, about 3.8 billion years ago, but only as a single cell. Over the next 3.8 billions of years, this single cell of life evolved into a self-conscious being of great complexity. One cannot fall into sin from a perfection that one never possessed. So, the idea of original sin is bankrupt. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened, so the way we traditionally tell the Christ story has become meaningless. One cannot be restored to a status that one has never possessed, so the way we talk about salvation has become irrelevant. Once these things are raised to consciousness, can any church continue to pretend that no one notices? Does the church not then look like a vestige of a long dead past? Those are the issues with which Christians must deal and the service of baptism raises them overtly.
Instead of seeing ourselves as fallen sinners, who need to be saved, we might begin to think of ourselves as incomplete human beings, who need to be made whole. Then Jesus can become not the savior of the fallen or the rescuer of the lost, but the presence of the God who empowers us to become all that we can be. That would be a dramatically new approach to Christianity, but it would be in line with all that we now know about our origins. It would also be in line with the Johannine Christ who came, he said, that we “might have life” abundantly.
So, we must look anew at baptism. It does not wash away the stain of original sin for a young and beautiful life like Chapman. It rather places Chapman overtly and self-consciously into a community of people committed to love him, and in which his life can be nurtured into a new fullness. In my church, the 1979 baptismal liturgy has clearly begun to move in that direction, but it is still bogged down in the “sin” definitions of yesterday Listen, however, to the hints of movement. For Chapman and, through him, for every newly-baptized person, we now pray: “Open his heart to your grace and truth. Fill him with your holy and life-giving spirit. Teach him to love others. Bring him to the fullness of your glory. Give him an enquiring and discerning heart, the courage to preserve and the gift of joy and wonder in all God’s works.”
The church is beginning to move from “original sin” into “original blessing.” We are beginning to abandon what we call “Atonement Theology.” As a church, we are, however, not yet where we need to be. Only those fearful of the future will try to hold this institution back. Baptism introduces us to a Christian life that frees us to live fully, empowers us to love wastefully and gives us the courage to be all that we were meant to be. If this perspective ever becomes the Christian message, then the church will spring back into life, drawing a hurting world to itself. God will then cease to be a noun that we feel compelled to define and will become instead a verb that we are called to live out. Then we can promise to give to each other what we pledged to give Chapman at his baptism, a full life, abundant love, the joy of God’s presence and the hope for eternity.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Sharan Melters from Haarlem in the Netherlands, writes:
Question:
My name is Sharan Melters. I am a Dutchman, 67 years old, married and living in Haarlem, a small city near Amsterdam. I studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing my studies, I worked for 40 years as a teacher at the University of Rotterdam (Hogeschool of Rotterdam). Among other things, I taught the students about violence, love relationships and child abuse, which are my areas of expertise.
Let me explain why I am writing this letter to you. After a so-called “near death experience,” I embraced a spiritual religious perspective and started to read as many of the books about the subject as I possibly could, including yours.
I think it is a pity that relatively few of my fellow Dutchmen are acquainted with your work. I am motivated to change this situation by translating your books into our language. In the meantime, I finished the translation of Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and A New Christianity for a New World. Before I started to study your writings, I translated Melissa Rafael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz and John Hospes, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.
I hope that you will appreciate and encourage my effort to enlighten the Dutch public with your post-rational inspiring reading of the Jesus story. In the meantime, it would be dishonest to keep silence about the fact that I struggled a lot with your point of view concerning evil (A New Christianity for a New World, pages 166-170). Please let me explain. You wrote, “So evil needs to be embraced and transformed as part of our quest for wholeness.” It startled me to read this and I did not understand your motivation. Embracing child abuse to become whole? Embracing the Holocaust to become whole? It is difficult to digest your opinion about this matter. But maybe I misunderstood. You would do me a favor writing a response to this letter of mine.
Answer:
Dear Sharan,
Thank you for your letter. Dutch is one of the European languages into which my books have not been translated so I welcome your initiative. My American publisher, HarperCollins, would be happy to work with you to get them published in the Netherlands and I would be honored. A Dutch publisher must be in touch with HarperCollins for permission to bring the book out in Dutch. They all know how to do that. The contract must be publisher to publisher and not individual to publisher. I will send my publisher a copy of your letter so that they can be in touch with you.
Let me now turn to your question. There is a difference between the concept of evil to which all of humanity is predisposed and the manifestations of evil which most of humanity deplores. In the statement you are questioning from my book, A New Christianity for a New World, I was trying to make sense out of a concept developed by Carl Jung. Human beings, he wrote, had to embrace the shadow side of human life out of which evil flows before we can be made whole. He did not mean that we had to condone or tolerate the manifestations of evil that express themselves in such things as child abuse or the Holocaust.
I do not accept the traditional Christian explanation of original sin which Christian theology suggests distorts our lives and pre-disposes us to evil. That concept assumes a perfect creation from which human life has fallen. As a post-Darwinian such an idea is inconceivable. Human life has emerged from a single cell into self-conscious complexity. There was no perfection from which we could fall.
As living creatures, however, we share in the drive to survive that marks every living thing. There is not a plant, animal or human that is not biologically driven to maximize survival. This drive to survive is real for all living things, but it does not become conscious until human life appears. When in human beings our drive to survive is combined with our self-conscious status the result is that human life is inevitably self-centered. Out of our drive for survival all of our prejudices arise, all of our needs to build ourselves up by tearing others down, all of our attempts to use others for our own self-gratification. Salvation does not mean overcoming the effects of the fall into original sin, it means embracing our reality including our shadow sides and responding to that which calls us beyond our survival needs into a new kind of humanity. Part of what I try to do in the book you have quoted is to recast the entire Christian faith in terms of this understanding of human life.
I will be addressing these things in a deeper and more profound way next fall, probably beginning in October, when I begin a series of columns on what I have called “My Twelve Theses,” which in Luther-like fashion form a call for a New Reformation. So, stay tuned!
John Shelby Spong
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