HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR
My Great Mentors - Number Seven
Clifford L. Stanley
He was my Professor of Theology, teaching me for two of the three years I was in Seminary. For me he was the major voice on that 1950′s faculty that had broken new theological ground. Most of the others were still locked in the dated Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth, which was rooted in the despair and inhumanity of World War I. I have always been suspicious of any movement that adopts “neo” as part of its name. It usually reflects the last gasp of what it was supposed to revive. Neo-Orthodoxy was clearly the last gasp of traditional Christian Orthodoxy in the 20th century. For the Neo-Orthodox movement, God was still envisioned as “a being” supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to this world, usually depicted as “above the sky.” Prayer was still an effort to make God serve our wills. Heaven and hell were still part of a massive behavior-controlling religious mechanism. Sacraments were still the means of divine grace, controlled totally by the religious institutions and capable of being celebrated only by those who bore the institution’s imprimatur, called ordination, which was buttressed by a fanciful authority claim known as “Apostolic Succession.” Except for this lone professor the faculty of my seminary was still caught in the prison of pre-modern thought. It has not changed much since, for the label of “Neo-Orthodoxy” has only been replaced by the slogan “Progressive Orthodoxy,” an oxymoron if ever I heard one. “Progressive Orthodoxy” reminds me of the political slogan, “Compassionate Conservatism,” which turned out to be little more than profound conservatism. I find “perfumed orthodoxy” no more appealing than “unperfumed orthodoxy.” It is designed to change nothing, but only to make the old things smell better, that is to make it appear to be relevant.
This professor’s name was Clifford L. Stanley. He had gained his Doctor of Theology degree at Union Seminary in New York City, studying under the great German Reformed theologian and refugee from Nazi Germany, Paul Tillich. Cliff was a thorough going Tillichian and he laid for me a theological foundation that would shape my entire career. Like most seminarians in my generation, I entered my preparation for the priesthood with a pious, Sunday school God. He, and God for me then was clearly a “he,” was very much the old man in the sky. Oh, we gussied up that definition with all kinds of sophisticated rhetoric, but when one peeled back the rhetoric, the old man in the sky, looking down, keeping record books, rewarding, punishing and deeply desirous of receiving the flattering praises of worshipers, was still there.
Cliff Stanley became a powerful force in the life of my class in our first year, not because we were studying with him yet, but because of an intense and painful personal experience. His wife, Helen, diagnosed with leukemia, died in that first year. My class, probably because our religious devotion was the highest and our understanding of God was the lowest, decided to engage Helen’s sickness as if it were inflicted upon her by the demonic forces of evil. We cast ourselves in the role of God’s warriors, aligning ourselves against that evil. Our weapon was prayer– passionate, long, unrelenting prayer. We were determined to roll back that disease with the power of God at our disposal in our prayers. We organized prayer cycles around the clock. Every minute of every day some member of our class was storming the gates of heaven in prayer for Helen. The real question was not whether Helen would survive, but whether she would survive long enough to see our efforts ended by physical exhaustion. She did not. The prayer vigil failed; leukemia won. Helen died in the middle of the night, leaving us in a faith crisis of failure and leaving Cliff and his children wracked with grief. The mood on that campus was solemn when we arrived that morning as the news of her death spread. To our amazement when we met our first class that day on the Old Testament, Cliff Stanley was there and taking over that class, he addressed us with his voice still breaking and his tears still apparent.
He tried to affirm our devotion and our love, without offending our zeal and immaturity. He tried to tell us that we should not see our efforts as failure. He suggested that maybe the world did not operate the way we assumed with God and the Devil battling over the souls of each of us. He tried to suggest that God might be far more than we were yet able to imagine. He told us that what really mattered was not the outcome of the events of life, but rather the realization that when we are forced to the depths of human existence, where pain and death both confront and embrace us, we discover that we are not alone; that God is not “a being” who comes to our rescue, but the “Ground of Being” in whom we live and from whom we cannot be parted. No, we did not understand all of his words that day, but we did see one whose faith had a depth that gave him the courage to be himself in that moment and to reach out to us as the ones who were really in need. It was for all of us an indelible and life-changing experience.
Paul Tillich shaped Clifford Stanley, who in turn shaped me. Tillich brought together the Christian symbols with aspects of our human experience. He correlated God with Being, Christ with existence and Spirit with life. He challenged the old myth of Christianity that postulated an original perfect creation, a subsequent fall from perfection into original sin, the need for rescue, which presumably was achieved on the cross and the subsequent restoration of our fallen humanity back into the perfection for which it had been created. That myth had not held water for hundreds of years, but that news had not reached even our seminaries, to say nothing of the pews of our churches. Yes, we talked about the Copernican revolution and the work of Galileo, which had removed the planet Earth from the center of the universe and had rendered homeless the God who was presumed to live above the sky, but these truths had not yet sunk in. We talked about the work of Isaac Newton, who revealed a universe that functioned according to immutable laws, which left little room in it for miracles or magic, leaving God for the most part unemployed. We were, however, still seduced by seemingly miraculous cures or visions of the virgin that we could not explain. Even today, we make a best seller out of a book entitled Proof of Heaven by a neurosurgeon who had a visionary experience. The human heart so desperately wants to believe in some supernatural, protective power despite all the evidence to the contrary, that we grasp at straws and, if that straw is offered by a learned man like a neurosurgeon, so much the better. On the other side of this debate, we can read the work of people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who have made fortunes writing best-selling books that demonstrate the absurdity of our theology with its “old man in the sky” concept of God. These writers do not seem to know that in professional theological circles, these concepts have been abandoned for generations.
Perhaps the most amusing thing to observe in the modern theological struggle is the deeply emotional resistance in Christian circles to the work of biologist Charles Darwin. Darwin said there was no original perfection so there could be no fall from perfection and thus no original sin. If no fall, there is no need for a savior to come to our rescue. The idea that God required the death of the divine son to pay the price of our sinfulness and thus to bear the punishment we deserve, is a barbaric idea that turns God into a monster, Jesus into a victim and you and me into guilt-filled pockets of gratitude.
All of these juvenile theological concepts Paul Tillich addressed, Cliff Stanley taught and we absorbed. Did we understand it? Not at first but all of my professional life has been lived inside the forced dialogue between the superstitious religion of my youth and my engagement with the modern world under the guidance of Paul Tillich through Cliff Stanley.
Cliff was a brilliant, functioning, but neurotic man. This showed up primarily in the preparation he demanded of himself. No matter how often he gave his lectures they were always fresh, powerful and meticulously outlined. He did not welcome interruptions for questions in his classroom. The classroom was his stage. He saw himself as one who was performing a work of art. Such a performance could not be stopped because someone in the audience did not understand! He also lived in a world of incredible order. Even when grocery shopping, his shopping cart was masterfully stacked and ordered when he came to check out. He tolerated chaos and disorder poorly. When the rebellion of the 60’s swept across America, he could not understand it. He saw Jack Kennedy as the nose under the tent of the Vatican’s quest for world power. He called some of the Vietnam protesters “draft dodging punks.” This man, who earlier in is career had been called a socialist, maybe even a communist, swung politically far to the right and he began to place his political hopes in a spokesman for General Electric, a former Hollywood B film actor, whose name was Ronald Reagan long before Reagan ran for Governor of California.
Cliff Stanley was largely unpublished because he would not allow an editor to change any of his beautifully crafted sentences. He laid out for me, however, the foundation that had enabled me to probe my Christian faith in ways that I could not have once imagined as a young man. The result has been a profound lifetime of search, study, wonder and excitement and my church has opened great doors of leadership to me. I am still a committed Christian believer, but I have forced that faith system into a dramatic dialogue with reality. Because Cliff Stanley was my great teacher and mentor, I can join in saying what an old retired bishop once said to me: “The older I get, the more deeply I believe, but the less beliefs I have.” Faith deepens with age, while specific beliefs become more and more inadequate.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Bob Doyle from Australia writes:
Question:
I embrace the divinity of Christ but do not wish to rely on the virgin birth or the resurrection as proof of that divinity. My pride in this “position” is my Achilles, I know, or at least suspect. In the sense that I am a new Christian (though able to trace the source of my faith to early Anglican experiences in the All Saints Church of Parramatta in Sydney, Australia). I am open to holding Christ’s teachings high, yet, as you have probably gathered, I am “holding back” in my faith. Love of his word (as reported) and of the sacrament, together with the power of forgiveness in my own life and the hope and love that the Christians I meet share, have all made me wonder: am I a failed Christian, as I believe Christianity too important to be relegated to the world of fairy stories or is there a place for me and my ilk in eternity?
Answer:
Dear Bob,
I see you as one who seeks to find God beyond the boundaries of your religious past. That is I believe what all of us must do. The question is whether the institutions that shaped our religious past will be open to our presence in their lives.
If you grew up, as you state, as a “Sydney, Australia Anglican” you surely know that the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney represents what is probably the most backward, literalistic brand of fundamentalism that one can find in the entire Anglican Communion. They are also judgmental, defensive and attack anyone who seeks intellectual integrity in worship. Christianity, as practiced by both the Sydney Anglicans under the leadership of the current Archbishop, Peter Jensen, and the Sydney Roman Catholics under the leadership of the current Cardinal Archbishop George Pell, are so out of touch with modern knowledge and contemporary scholarship that they are the main reasons that Australia is increasingly a secular and non-religious society.
Ultimate truth cannot be captured in the words of the Bible, the creeds, the doctrines or the liturgies of any religious tradition. All of these things are only pointers toward a truth they cannot capture. Their claims of possessing truth in either their “inerrant scriptures or in their “infallible” religious leaders are as arrogant as they are nonsensical.
Having said that, I will continue to walk into the mystery of God via the Christ path. I call myself a Christian. I feel bound to live my life in such a way as to share life, love and being with every other child of God. Increasingly I find communities of faith that embrace these ideas and I am comfortable to live within these communities. I hope you can find such a place in Australia.
My best,
John Shelby Spong
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