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Charting a New Reformation,
Part IX – An Evolving God inside an Evolving Christianity
Today, I conclude the discussion of the first of my twelve theses posted on the internet in my hope to “Chart a New Reformation.” I began with the crucial task of reimagining God, which is foundational in all religious thinking. I have struggled to be careful with the way I use words. I have sought to be thorough and clear, so as not to ask of words what they cannot deliver. To accomplish this is to force human language to expand to the point that language itself becomes symbolic, pointing to truth while no longer pretending to be vessels which contain truth. This process is not an easy one and it raises anxiety in the minds of my readers, especially my religious readers, who search for the security of certainty, a security which when found always turns out to be just another bit of idolatry. Religious honesty requires the admission that certainty in religion is always an illusion, never a real possibility. Religion, which probably came into existence to provide security for self-conscious creatures wrestling with issues of mortality, finitude and meaning, is now being forced to admit that it has no security to offer. Radical insecurity must now come to be seen as a virtue that we must learn to embrace.
I began with a distinction between experience and explanation. An insect can experience the presence of a bird, but no insect has the frame of reference out of which it could ever describe to another insect what it means to be a bird. Similarly a horse has the ability to experience the presence of a human life. No horse, however, has the frame of reference that would enable it to describe to another horse what it means to be human. We understand each of these illustration well enough, but when we drive these conclusions into the realm of the human we begin to assume a capacity for human life that we would never attribute to a lesser creature. A human being, I am quite convinced, has the ability to experience God, but no human being has the frame of reference that would enable that human life to describe to another human being what it means to be God. This means that all of our creeds, our doctrines and our dogmas are human bound definitions that are in the last analysis nothing but human creations; none is the product of what we have called “divine revelation.” The obvious conclusion to which we are driven is that while I am quite confident that human beings can experience the presence of God, I am now quite convinced that it is completely beyond the realm of human competence to explain what it means to be God. One would not understand that, however, by listening to the God talk bandied about in all religious assemblies. That is why doing serious theological thinking in a public place or through a public medium is so difficult and so fraught with peril.
Most people cannot and therefore, will not embrace the levels of ambiguity that theology requires. They will not be drawn to the enterprise of probing the symbols of our faith story for meaning. They will not want to do the painstaking, slow and laborious work of clearing their minds of normal human presuppositions. This debate will, therefore, never be a popular one with the majority of religious people. It is something that we will have to do for them whether they want it done or not. They are, in any event, not the audience I seek. I speak to those who know that the religious assumptions of their childhood can no longer form the answers for them. I speak for those whose god is so small that they have dismissed this god from the realm of their reality. I speak to that which someone once called the “God-shaped hole” that seems to permeate the human consciousness and no matter what substance we place into that “God-shaped” hole it never really fits. That in no way, however, diminishes the importance of this task. So I continue to walk this path and I hope you will continue to walk with me. The journey is always worth the effort.
Let me confess that I undertake this journey as a Christian. I think it is important to state that both up front and clearly. I am a Christian both by choice and by conviction. I do not, however, understand Christianity as a religious system with fixed points of revealed truth. I see it rather as an evolving home in which I dwell happily. The forces that created and that continue to create this evolving faith are a rising human consciousness, an ever-expanding body of human knowledge and a growing capacity to achieve human insight. I do not think that Christianity is now or ever has been an unchanging tradition. This faith system did not drop from heaven in some newly revealed dimension. We rather evolved out of Judaism, breaking its boundaries in the process. We then incarnated ourselves in a variety of forms throughout history, riding each one until it broke open, unable to contain the meaning it struggled to communicate. During each of our historic phases we made excessive claims for every one of these forms. We had delusions of infallibility and inerrancy and we made dogmatic claims that sought to transform what were partial truths at best into ultimate truths that we pretended constituted the “one true faith” practiced by the “one true Church.” Each of these delusions would, in time, be abandoned as too small to be what we claimed it to be, but that abandonment was achieved only through fierce rejection, the intense persecution of those people or ideas that propelled the change and institutional attempts to dig defensive trenches around the “true faith.” Christianity has no ultimate stated certainty; it is an ever- evolving faith into which we are privileged to walk if we are to live into the future. I believe we will always endure only because we always live in flux. Human beings will inevitably create and recreate the religion they need to survive. Christianity is a human vehicle designed to allow that creative process to go on and on and on.
As consciousness grows and expands, the conclusions of yesterday become inoperative in the faith of tomorrow. If one has literalized yesterday’s conclusions, formed a set “Orthodoxy,” which resists change arising from any source, then it becomes clear that the religion of that era is destined to take its place in the museums of human history alongside animism, fertility goddesses, the Baal and the gods of Mt. Olympus. When gods are human creations, they participate in human mortality. Theism is only the latest of the God casualties.
Allow me to illustrate this with the central Christian symbol, the idea of God as a Trinity. Is that a truth about God or a description of human experience? Is a knowledge of God’s being ever a human possibility? Are not definitions of God always definitions of human experience? Theology thus is always about my understanding of God, not about God. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, therefore, describes the evolving of the human experience. It was certainly not a revealed truth, nor was it the way the earliest Christians understood God. Paul, for example, was clearly not a Trinitarian. For the Jewish Paul, God was “One;” nothing approached or modified that “Oneness.” Paul says in Romans that God “designated” Jesus as “Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). God is the designator, Jesus is the one designated; that is not co-equality or Trinitarian. Paul said that the life Jesus lived, he lived to God. We become alive to God through Jesus, he asserted. For Paul, Jesus was a doorway into the ultimate, Jesus was not “the ultimate.” God, as “Father” reflected ideas from the childhood of our humanity. God was the protective power that human beings sought desperately to access. To make the power of God work for them was the essence of worship and of religion. This distant, powerful, parent-deity was believed to have the ability to control the weather, cure sicknesses and defeat one’s enemies. Natural disasters like the flood at the time of Noah resulted from the human failure to keep God’s law. Our hymns still express that hope. We sing: “Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave.” Floods, tidal waves and tsunamis, however, reveal that the restless waves were not bound.
Religion, including Christianity, in this period of human history was childlike based on a protective deity. In many ways, early Christianity was a religion of fear and control. Because we had failed to be pleasing to God, Christianity became a religion of penitence, guilt and a begging for mercy. We were not allowed to grow up. We were children seeking to please the powerful “Father” or parent God. It is hard to grow up until we leave the “Father’s house.”
Developing Christology was one of the things that allowed us to begin to grow out of this childlike religious form. Christology arose in the late third and early fourth centuries with the suggestion that God had entered human life, which served to give human life a dignity it had not had before. As Christianity came to understand itself in this new way, we began to tell the story of the father God, who by drawing near to us, suffered the consequences of being in the human arena of pain and death and who called us into a new level of humanity. Of course, the Jesus story got corrupted in the telling of it. The idea that God could take on human form, however, meant that we had come to an awareness that humanity might have a potential we had never realized before. It was a major shift in consciousness. Next we began to entertain the story of the Holy Spirit, which universalized the Christ story. Now all people, not just Jesus, could be God-filled. There was no longer anything unique about a God-filled humanity. Maturity had begun to set in. This set the stage for our next step. Discovering a humanity that was the medium through which the holy could be seen and experienced as present became a new possibility.
Another turn in consciousness was about to be discovered and entertained. That is the door against which we are knocking today. Maybe the human and the divine are the same. We file that now with the promise to return to it after we have looked at the Christ story. An evolving Christianity is not our fear, but our hope. We turn now to the Christ as the journey continues.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
John Bowers, a Disciples of Christ Minister, writes via the Internet:
Question:
I am a Disciples of Christ minister and I often cite and use your insights in preparing sermons. I was wondering if you have any preferred commentaries that you consider exegetically sound.
Answer:
Dear John,
The short and quick answer to your question is No! At least there is no single volume commentary or even a single series of commentaries on every book of the Bible that I would recommend. Most ministers or churches in the last half of the 20th century have in their personal or church libraries a set of books called The Interpreter’s Bible. They are not bad, but they are also not profound and by now are badly dated. Nonetheless you can find in that series something about every book in the Bible. Not many people are going to write commentaries on Obadiah, Haggai or Nahum, but the Interpreter’s Bible covers them all.
This is not to say that there are not some great commentaries. There are, but they tend to represent the life work of one scholar. When I was preparing my book on the Fourth Gospel, there were two Johannine commentaries that when I completed them, I felt as if I had been on holy ground. The two authors were C. H. Dodd and Rudolf Bultmann. I was thrilled by the commentary of Gerhard von Rad on Genesis and Ernst Haenchen on Acts. Michael Goulder’s work on Luke feeds me daily.
I am fortunate to live near Drew University with its outstanding theological library, which helps Methodist clergy in their preparation for Methodist ministry in the Drew University Theological School. This theological school’s librarian, Jesse Mack, can help me to find almost anything I want in that library. My recommendation to young clergy – older ones too – is that you work on one book of the Bible every year and that you choose to aid you in that study an outstanding commentary on that book and quite literally master that book and that commentary. At the rate of dedicating just thirty minutes a day to this study, you can complete and master that book of the Bible in the course of a year, even the longest books of the Bible. I’ve already mentioned my favorites on some biblical books. Ask the faculty of the theological seminary where you trained to suggest their favorites on some of the other books of the Bible.
If you master five or six of the great commentaries on five or six of the most significant books of the Bible, your life and ministry will be greatly enriched.
Thank you for your service and my blessings on your work.
John Shelby Spong
Announcements
In Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy, Spong annotates the Gospel of Matthew and so provides a blueprint for the Church’s future—one that allows the faithful to live inside the Christian story while still embracing the modern world.
Click here for more information!
