Spong is the Episcopal (Anglican) Bishop of New Jersey. His stated goal is to write to "believers in exile," who have given up on the Church and religion because of the gap between modern thought and antiquated religious ideas. He identifies himself as a "believer in exile:"
I am one of a countless host of modern men and women for whom traditional religious understandings have lost most of their ancient power. We are the silent majority of people who find it difficult to be members of the Church and still be thinking people. (p. 4)Actually, Spong's book is another that attempts to bridge the gap between the informed pulpit and the pew. Clergy have been slow to speak the biblical scholarship widely known for more than a century. Consequently, lay people tend to think clergy believe and defend the ancient understanding of the faith as put forth in the creeds and hymns used every Sunday. Bishop Spong tries to speak to those who have "caught on" through their own thinking and reading, and have gradually drifted away from church and religion.
It is a book along the same lines as Bishop Robinson's Honest to God, and Marcus Borg's The God We Never Knew. Spong goes more deeply into historic and scholarly backgrounds of changes in religious thinking. He takes us through Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Jung, Einstein and Sagan. He summarizes:
The understanding of God as a theistic, supernatural parent figure in the sky was finally rendered no longer operative. God was simply drained out of existence as a working premise in our society. Rewards and punishments, either in this life or in the life to come, ceased to be primary motivators of our behavior. (p. 40)The major change required of the Church is to declare the old idea of God dead. This happens, says Spong:
Other gods have died in human history before this generation. No alters are today erected anywhere to Baal, Astarte, Molech, Re, Jupiter, Zeus, Mars, or Mithra. (p. 40)In the preface (p. xviii) the author mentions Michael D. Goulder as one of his mentors. Goulder is a New Testament scholar who took his conclusions to the extent that he declared himself an atheist, and resigned from the priesthood and church. Apparently his conscience would not allow him to be tied to a faith system he rejected. The bare difference between Goulder and most others, is that Goulder does not attempt to restructure God and Christian theology as Spong does.
The big question among "exiles" is whether it is possible to be believers and, if so, in what? Goulder has concluded that since God doesn't do anything anymore, why bother? He no longer wanted to be considered a believer in "a virtually unemployed deity." (p. 44) He did not want to be considered at theist, which, according to one theologian is defined as
Something like a person without a body, who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good, is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe. (p. 46)An anthropomorphic projection of God is rejected as a God concept of yesterday that no longer works in our time and world. Spong agrees with Freud that humans created a particular idea of God to cope with human need. This theistic understanding of God as a
Personal being with expanded supernatural, human, and parental qualities, which has shaped every idea in the Western world, came into existence not through divine intervention but out of human need. Today this theism is collapsing. (p. 54)So Spong's point has to do with the end of theism. People just aren't buying into the old God ideas any more. The old idea is not likely to revive again.
In human history no dying concept of God has ever yet been resuscitated. (p. 59)So he moves away from the universal who questions to what questions. God becomes the what at the ground of existence. He cites Bultmann, Whitehead, Bonhoeffer and Tillich, who are among the many scholars of our century who have attempted to move our thinking about God out of the old theism. He summarizes:
There is no God external to life. God, rather, is the inescapable depth and center of all that is. God is not a being superior to all other beings. God is the Ground of Being itself. (p. 79)(I might add my metaphor of God as the Operating System of life).
He spends a chapter visiting with the Jesus issues. Again, he covers ground dealt with books like Funk's Honest to Jesus, and Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. He speaks of scholarship issues most clergy were exposed to in the better seminaries from the beginning of this century. His basic point is that the biblical reports of Jesus give a different picture from what people actually experienced with Jesus due to attempts to deify him. Behind the various adoration stories there was an experience worth understanding.
After rejecting the cosmic savior scheme with Jesus as the sacrificed savior, Spong follows Borg's idea of Jesus as a spirit person. If Spong can connect the non-theistic God with Jesus, maybe Christianity can have a future. In the humanity of Jesus he sees as much divinity as he needs to remain a follower.
Another part of Christianity lost with the death of the theistic God is traditional prayer. Why pray to a God that doesn't do anything? But if God is the name of the Ground of Being, is it not prayer to be united with that Ground? Prayer is relationship with the Center, the Core, the Ground.
Prayer is being present, sharing love, opening life to transcendence. It is not necessarily words addressed heavenward. (p. 145)The theistic basis for ethics also goes away with the death of theism. Doing good because of biblical law or an all-seeing eye in the sky or for fear of divine punishment or promise of heavenly reward—all these motivators are gone. One must choose what is right and good because it is right or good. The motivation is internal, coming from a self in communion with the Ground of Being.
So Spong moves on to talk about the Church of the future—a changed Church. He portrays Churches today as still filled with concepts of theistic supernaturalism. Also as dying. He talks about the Church changing its liturgy to get away from theistic symbols and language. His proposals are hardly new or radical. We know of Churches who have been doing and thinking this way for years. Perhaps the Anglicans are a bit late on the scene.
With theism dead and no "up there" for heaven above, hope for life after life is greatly diminished. He reports the Time magazine feature Does Heaven Exist? The reporters couldn't find much conviction about heaven, even from traditionalists. He asks the basic questions:
If the theistic parent deity in the sky can no longer be the content of the meaning of God, if heaven and hell are dismissed as mechanisms of medieval behavior control, can any religious value that was based on those assumptions endure? Can a believer in exile hope for the permanence of his or her being amid the finite and transitory life that we have come to experience in our secular generation? Can the faith that emerges beyond the exile have a credible concept of life after death attached to it? (p. 209)Spong would move our idea of heaven from an after life reward for people who have followed the rules, to a continuation of our oneness with the Ground of Being in whom we live and move and have our being.
His final chapter is an attempt to rework the traditional faith statements in language consistent with a non-theistic understanding of God. This may be important for those who wish to carry on inside the Church. For those truly in exile it is superfluous. Why bother? If one has theological and liturgical background enough to follow him—and the interest—I think he does a good job.
There is a line that sounds to me like Spong over-plays the uniqueness of his contribution to Christian thinking:
Then [in less than 100 years] the world can judge my contribution as to whetherIf Spong's assessment of the demise of theism in Christianity is on the mark, then what happens will happen no matter what he writes. Many others are attempting to get the Churches to be more open in discussing the scholarship issues known to most clergy. Dealing with the consequences of this scholarship is the real work of the pastor-teacher with people. The work means facing the issue of faithful teaching of those pietistic souls whose whole faith is based on a non-existent biblical foundation. It is an on-going task that pastors have neglected for almost a century. As Spong has shown, scores are "in exile" as a result.
it destroyed the old or created the new. (p. 227)
I would suspect that in most Churches today, those who denied belief in a person-God—a theistic God—would be considered non-believers. Those who deny the historicity of Jesus' words and deeds, and who deny ability to affirm the creeds would be considered non-Christians. Perhaps the honorable thing to do would be for all of us who think that way to declare ourselves non-theists (atheist is emotionally loaded), renounce our confession of faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God, resign from Church membership and give up our ordained status. Then we could offer ourselves as spiritual leaders and teachers with a commitment to honesty in teaching of religious matters and to compassionate sharing in the lives of a seeking community.
My prophecy is that conservative Christianity will continue to draw followers from those with a will to believe—those who are drawn to superstition and conspiracy theories and speculation—and carry on for centuries. There will be variations on the Christian message, such as Mormonism (as well as Catholicism) that will continue to sell their connection with an after-life.
However, in the long, long run I believe
that people some day—in a 1,000 years or so—will study Christianity as
a semi-mythical religion. They will wonder how we believed it so uncritically.
They will also notice that our religion was central to horrible atrocities
of human against human. Its persecutions, slavery, racism, sexism, intolerance,
arrogance and militarism will overshadow the benevolence produced by Christianity.
Maybe the bottom line is that Christianity should both change and die.
It would be better if something of the spirit of Jesus could rise up to
replace the religion claiming his name.