HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Carrying My Understanding of Christianity to France In two lectures in Paris, France, this summer and through various other media, I sought to place into the religious conversation of that nation a new way of looking at Jesus of Nazareth. The majority of both audiences that I addressed consisted of people who still have some relationship with institutional Christianity. The first was primarily those who had a Protestant orientation and the second those primarily of a Catholic orientation. In the Protestant audience some clergy were present. In the Catholic audience no clergy were visible, but one person in the question period did identify himself as a Jesuit. One of the Protestant pastors was the senior minister of the church which hosted the lecture. He was French and French speaking with only a limited facility in English. His church may have been the largest and most active, indigenous Protestant congregation in Paris. He was tall, about forty, clearly impressive in ability and his response led me to believe that he was on my theological wavelength. He had welcomed me warmly. His name was James Woody, which surprised me because it did not sound French at all. I discovered that he received his name from his grandfather, who had landed with the American army on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. He then fought the Germans until they were ousted from France. In the course of his service, he fell in love with and married a French woman. Their son was the father of this pastor; hence James Woody was the rather Anglicized sounding name of this French-speaking Protestant pastor. The second identifiable Protestant pastor was an expatriate, serving the American Protestant Church in Paris. His name was the Rev. Dr. Scott Herr and his ecclesiastical background was Presbyterian. His church was similar to the American Episcopal Cathedral located just a few blocks away. Both of these churches were built to serve the American business and diplomatic communities living in Paris. The Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral is the Very Reverend Lucinda Laird, who once served with great distinction as the rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Teaneck, New Jersey. She was not present for my lectures as she was attending a clergy conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, although Christine and I did get the chance to have dinner with her later that week. My sense is that her congregation is basically American with perhaps some English citizens who live in Paris. The questions that came in the discussion following the lecture in the Protestant Church reflected the same modern tensions we find in the United States. Sometimes, they also revealed a defensive clergy mentality and a fear of stepping too far outside the traditional formulas of Christianity. For example, one questioner asked, “Do I have to agree with all of your premises to get to your conclusions?” with which, he stated, he generally agreed. I suspect that if we had had time to develop his comments. I would have discovered that he was in fundamental disagreement with my conclusions in regard to such things as the necessity of finding a way to talk about “God” without using the familiar theistic vocabulary. People are not aware that theistic language always sees God as a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world in some spatial realm and able to intervene in human history in invasive, miraculous ways. Christianity’s concepts of Incarnation, Atonement and its doctrines of the Holy Trinity, all assume a theistic God definition, and all of these ideas are very difficult to translate into categories understood by those who live inside an educated, modern world view. Despite that problem this theistic language continues to be used in Christian liturgies Sunday after Sunday, in both Protestant and Catholic churches. That is one of the major unrecognized reasons that so many people today find themselves unable to relate to the language of worship. Other questions also revealed this unrelatedness. “What specific changes would you call for in the liturgy for Christianity to be able to live in our world in a new way?” one asked. That question assumes that one can make minimal adaptations around the edges of Christian thinking and accomplish the goals about which I wrote in my book on Jesus. That is no more in touch with reality than those who re-arranged the deck chairs on the Titanic just before that ship sank into the sea. A radical reorientation of our understanding of both God and human life is required. We need a shift from the idea of God as a being to the possibility of God as “Being” itself. We need to drop atonement language altogether. We need to dispense with the concept of Jesus as the “savior of the sinful,” the “redeemer of the fallen” and the “rescuer of the lost.” We need to see salvation in terms of wholeness. We need to stop relating to God as if we are trembling children standing before an abusive parent or as if we are convicted felons standing before a hanging judge. We need to drop penitential language like, “Lord have mercy” and “Kyrie Eleison.” If I had spelled out these requirements more specifically I wondered if any of the clergy present that night would have been prepared to take on such a task. One of them described himself as a “generous conservative,” an interesting phrase that seemed to make a virtue out of clinging to the theological patterns of the past. Another worried about how these concepts would translate to our children. That is always a smokescreen. Our children have given us their answers; we simply have not been willing to hear them. Every poll shows that those we call the “millenials,” that is those who came to their maturity in the 21st century, are today stepping outside of organized religion in droves. Their parents know that and so parental questions about what kind of theological language will engage their children is little more than a reflection of the parents religious anxieties, but without the courage that their children seem to have in being able to admit it. If we adults do not face the fact that our churches are in a statistical freefall, we will never be able to take the action needed to address this reality. Most Christian congregations have never even dealt with the contemporary biblical scholarship of the last 200 years. If they cannot face that, there is little reason to think that they have the ability to grapple with creedal and liturgical issues that are challenged by current theological thinking. Protestantism is very weak in France, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, but so is the Roman Catholic Church. Rigor mortis would be too lively a phrase to describe the life of Christianity in not just France, but in most of Europe today. When I arrived the next night at the Catholic venue, the previously mentioned self-designated Jesuit, was the only person who admitted to a significant relationship with this church. Catholic monuments abound in France, but Catholic practice is almost non-existent. The shortage of clergy is desperate and quite apparent. One priest might today serve as many as five churches, having time for little more than “saying Mass.” Take the tourists out of Notre Dame Cathedral and the congregations on Sunday mornings would be embarrassing. I found little here respect for what might be called “Catholic thinking,” since most French people assume that the Catholic Church has little wisdom to offer to this generation. When prodded they would regularly say something like “the hierarchy is so conservative, they are out of touch.” Some of the questions arising from my “Catholic” audience were these: “I wonder if you are not losing part of the incarnation in your approach?” “Why do you keep using the phrase fully human?” “How could the human Jesus step beyond the boundaries of his humanity?” “Was Jesus not religious? In your book, you cite 23 references to Jesus being in the synagogue. Does that not indicate that he was religious?” The Jesuit stated that he basically agreed with my concepts. Then he went on to say that no book can interpret Jesus completely and suggested that mine did not either. I did not disagree with him, but in my opinion he was seeking to appear open to new possibilities without ever having to commit himself to anything. In the last analysis he did not even ask a question, he only inquired as to how I might relate to his comments. “I do not have answers,” I responded. I only believe that we must start a new religious conversation. The first step is to let go of the language of the past; it no longer works. The second is to learn to walk faithfully into the unknown without yesterday’s certainties impeding us. Any religious system that purports to offer security is an empty idolatry. People trained in the traditional Christian pattern of history, so often cannot even get past this first step. It was my third audience, the totally secular representatives of the French Press that gave me hope. They like most of France were completely non-religious. They had no agenda or turf to protect. They asked questions not out of defensiveness or fear, but out of a quest for knowledge. For them this press conference was a possible story, nothing more. Their first response was shock, rooted in the fact that I was a bishop saying things they had never heard a bishop say before. Shock quickly turned into interest, however, not so much in my answers, but in what they perceived to be my authenticity. Religious debates in their experience were between two equally irrelevant positions. The debate I sought to inaugurate was about the search for truth with no “sacred cows” needing to be defended. It is about how human beings can process transcendence, about how I find meaning inside an institution which they had long ago abandoned, about how to deal with life’s limits and life’s fears, and about whether there is anything by any name that we can call ultimate. The most encouraging memory of my time in France is rooted in the fact that the press conference went on for three hours with no journalists leaving and then during a radio interview the following day, learning that the producer in the control room let out a few “wows” as the dialogue developed. If my writings ever make an impression in France, it will be because the media presents them to the nation. I discovered there that a “God shaped hole” is still in the soul of the secular French. The world in all of its non-religious secularity still yearns to have it filled with meaning. ~John Shelby Spong Read the essay online here. Question & Answer John Fugelsang, via the Internet, writes: Question: I've come to view Jesus much the way I view Elvis. I love the guy, but the fan clubs really freak me out. I think a lot of the times the mistake we make is confusing God and religion and thinking they're the same thing. What we have now is all the fundamentalist Christians who read the Bible and they skip right from the golden calf to Revelation - and then the "Left Behind" books and they kind of leave out the fact that Jesus was pretty much the most extremely liberal guy ever in history and literature or wherever your belief system locates him. You look at the character of Jesus and he scares the hell out of the conservatives even today. If Jesus came back today, you wouldn't be able to hear him talk over the sound of Christians calling him a socialist. Jesus was anti-wealth, anti-death penalty, anti-public prayer, never anti-gay, anti-abortion and never anti-premarital sex among other parameters. Answer: Dear John, Thank you for your letter. It is almost breathtaking in its scope. I can appreciate your point without necessarily agreeing with all the leaps you took to reach your refreshing conclusions. Let me try to respond. There are certainly some comparisons to be made between Jesus and Elvis Presley. They both had devoted followers and one could even say that the followers of both were unable to accept the reality of their heroes’ deaths. They both spawned movements dedicated to keeping the memories that inspired many alive. Those two movements obviously distorted the memory of their heroes in many ways, not the least of which was turning the movements into profit-making institutions. Lest we get carried away with easy comparisons, however, there are also some vast differences. Elvis was primarily an entertainer. Jesus was prophetic in that he led people to new understandings of life and removed many of the barriers that so many impose on life’s potential. Jesus called people to wholeness and, according to the only records we have, lived out that wholeness even when being publicly executed. Elvis exhibited the hedonistic indulgences of a broken and distorted life. He died, excessively overweight, addicted to drugs and to alcohol. Those are pretty substantial differences. The “Left Behind” books do in fact distort the Jesus story rather dramatically; so do the religious institutions that have been created to extend Jesus’ memory to future generations. I do not recognize Jesus frequently in the claims of those who purport to speak for him. Through the ages, the church in both its Catholic and Evangelical Protestant forms has been anti-Semitic, anti-Moslem, anti-women, anti-gay and racist. The Christian Church has carried out the Crusades, the Inquisition, endorsed slavery, resisted desegregation, advocated an inferior identity for women and people of color, called homosexual people deviant, evil and depraved, when the only “sin” of the homosexual was, we now know, to be born with a sexual orientation different from the majority. What you, John, do not seem to understand, however, is that the Christian Church has also raised up within itself visionary voices that bear witness to unpopular truths that eventually have forced institutional change. Abraham Lincoln, while never comfortable in church, read the Bible daily and that Bible informed his commitment to end slavery and to issue the “Emancipation Proclamation.” The Civil Rights movement was a movement led by Christian clergy of all denominations, first as courageous minority voices, but ultimately achieving a majority status. I remind you that Martin Luther King, Jr. was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and that his homiletical genius was born in a deep engagement with Holy Scripture. The church also inspired and raised up the voices of women from Mary Magdalene to Julian of Norwich to Joan of Arc to Dorothy Day to Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza to Nancy Wittig to Barbara Harris to Katharine Jefferts-Schori. These women first challenged and ultimately defeated institutional sexism. No, that battle is not over. Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox Christians will not yet ordain women, but inevitably they will and sooner than their hierarchies now think! The Church of England has finally run out of delaying tactics and will open the bishop’s office to women very soon. There will be no turning back on this. The battle for gay rights, gay acceptance and gay justice has been fought inside the structures of the Christian Church as well as outside it. Great pioneers like Fr. John J. McNeill in the Roman Catholic Church, Louie Crew and the Rev. Robert Williams, the Rev. Barry Stopfel, The Rev David Norgard, The Rev. Elizabeth Kaeton, The Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, The Rt. Rev. Mary Glasspool, The Very Rev. Tracy Lind and countless others in the Episcopal Church have not only challenged, but in some cases, have overcome and defeated the homophobia of institutional Christianity. The followers of Elvis Presley have never raised up minority voices to purge and to purify their movement. The Bible asserts time and again that Christianity is called to be a minority movement, but always affecting the majority. We are told in the New Testament to be the leaven in the dough that causes the bread to rise, to be the salt in the soup that gives it flavor and to be the light in the darkness that will not be extinguished. I am a Christian, not because I am proud of the history of institutional Christianity, but because I believe that minority Christian voices can and do purge institutional Christianity of its excesses and of its life-diminishing prejudices. You seem to have some sense of who this revolutionary person called Jesus is that we Christians follow. I invite you to cease standing outside ecclesiastical structures as an external critic and to come inside, enter the trenches where the battles are being fought and there to make a difference. If you do you will know how shallow it is to compare the Elvis movement to the Jesus movement. ~John Shelby Spong Announcements **We apologize for the delay in today's essay. It was due to our Mailchimp account - which was temporarily suspended. 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