A Fool For Christ

By Eric Von Salzen

In this post, I’m going to criticize the teachings of a bishop of the Episcopal Church. If you think it’s foolish for a mere mentor in Education for Ministry to take issue with a bishop, you’re undoubtedly correct. Still, remember Paul’s words: “If you think you are wise in this age you should become fools so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”

Several years ago, a friend suggested to me that learning about the scriptures, the history of the Christian church, theology, philosophy, and so forth in EFM – however interesting it might be – was worthless in terms of developing or increasing religious faith. In fact, he said, if you want a model of Christian faith, don’t seek out a theologian; instead, find an ignorant, uneducated Bolivian peasant. The peasant will have more faith than all the professors in a school of theology put together.

My friend may well be right. I can’t endorse his idea based on observations, because I’ve never actually met a Bolivian peasant. But I can imagine that a strong religious faith would be found in a community where religion and culture are strongly interwoven, where the same messages of faith have been heard generation after generation, where arguments against the faith are rarely heard and never heeded. In that community, my friend’s peasant would have no need of EFM, or any other kind of academic religious study.

That, however, isn’t the world I live in. I live in a world in which religion is often compartmentalized off from daily life, where the “real world” is the secular world, where the proponent of religion is often regarded as a naïf if not a scoundrel, and it’s sophisticated to be an atheist. And for better or worse, I’m part of that world. For me, religious education has been an essential element in the development of my religious faith.

And this brings me to Bishop John Shelby Spong. I’ve heard about Spong for years. His is one of those names that have become part of the popular consciousness. If you ask the man or woman on the street to name a contemporary religious figure, Spong’s name is likely to come up – it won’t be the first one mentioned, or the second, but after the Pope, and Billy Graham, and some televangelists, by the time they get to number 10 or 15, they’ll certainly mention Bishop Spong.

I also knew that Bishop Spong was regarded as unorthodox by people whose views on religious matters I respect. I’ve noticed that when “conservative” or “centrist” Episcopalians want to give examples of where the “left wing” of our church goes off the rails, they usually complain about “people like Spong”. I’m not sure who else there is in our church who is “like Spong”, but certainly Spong himself is a familiar symbol.

On the other hand, I have friends who seem to me to be good Christians, God-fearing folk, regular church attendees, who like and admire Bishop Spong, and regard him as a good influence on the church. (This admiration may mainly be due to Bishop Spong’s opposition to discrimination against women and gays. If so, I honor him for that, but it isn’t the subject of this post.)

So here I was, holding myself out as being knowledgeable about religious matters, an EFM mentor, a blogger on Anglican Centrist, yet I’d never read any of Bishop Spong’s books.

Therefore, I went to Barnes & Noble last week and bought a Spong book. There were quite a few to choose from, but I picked A New Christianity For A New World, for several reasons. First, it was one of the few Spong books that didn’t have the word “Bishop” in the title or subtitle (“A Bishop Rethinks” this or that, “A Bishop Speaks”, etc.); second, it seemed to deal with large, general issues (unlike his books dealing with specific issues like human sexuality, or the role of women, etc.); and third it was the most recent Spong paperback on the shelf. And now I’ve read it.

It seems that I picked the right book. Although I can’t certify that it’s typical of his oeuvre (in his preface he suggests that it represents a further evolution in his thinking, beyond his earlier books), he describes this work as “a final Spong book” to “spell out the future shape of Christianity.” Just what I was looking for. Sort of the Spongian equivalent of The City of God or the Augsburg Confession.

Bishop Spong’s thesis in this book is that “theism” is dead, but that religion generally and Christianity specifically can survive in the post-theistic world, if they follow his recommendations.

Bishop Spong doesn’t define what he means by “theism”. (I’ve always understood that word to be a kind of generic heading under which to list all the different notions about the divine – except the notion that there is no divine, which is put under the separate heading of “atheism”.) The closest Spong comes to explaining “theism” is to say that “I do not define God as a supernatural being”. The key word in that statement seems to be “being”. Depending on what you mean by “a being”, a lot of orthodox Christians could agree that God isn’t a “being”, yet not think that they have thereby declared the death of theism.

Bishop Spong doesn’t try to disprove the Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) concept of God; he simply declares that “we” can’t believe in it anymore. “God, understood theistically, is no longer operative in our belief systems, no matter how hard we try to hold on to this premodern deity”, he says.

Other “death of God” advocates have argued that religion was invented to explain the mysteries of the natural world, and science has now rendered religion unnecessary by explaining those mysteries. Bishop Spong does mention the “gap-filler” function of religion and the increasing irrelevance of God for that purpose, but this is a secondary point. The main function of theism for him is to ease our existential anxiety.

Bishop Spong tells us that God is the result of human evolution. He explains that when human beings evolved to the point that they became “self-conscious”, they realized, as no animal does nor any pre-human ancestor did, that they were mortal, and it scared them. They found themselves in a chronic state of danger, where mortality was inevitable, and the world was so vast “that they were reduced to a sense of themselves as almost totally insignificant.” To cope with this anxiety, they invented politics, fire, and – “the most powerful coping device of all” – “the theistic concept of God”. This “insight”, Spong assures us, must be believed because it came originally from Sigmund Freud.

I confess that I have trouble reconciling what seem to me to be two conflicting ideas. If theism is the device whereby we human beings cope with mortality, and we are still mortal, how can we have abandoned theism without having first found a satisfactory substitute coping mechanism? Spong doesn’t address this problem; he doesn’t really seem to be aware of it.

When he turns from theism in general to Christianity, Bishop Spong gets a bit more specific, and I think we can begin to see what he means when he says that theism is “no longer operative.” To show that Christianity is no longer operative, he asserts that both the story of Jesus’ “miraculous entry” into the world, and the story of his “miraculous exit”, have “been rendered literally meaningless by new knowledge”. Bishop Spong asserts that the “deepest problem” with the birth story is that it “reflects a premodern understanding of the human birth process” that we can no longer accept. Back in the First Century, he explains, “people did not understand the woman’s role in reproduction”, but now, thanks to “our expanded knowledge of genetics, biology, and reproduction”, we do. Because both parents contribute to the child’s genetic makeup, the result of Mary’s encounter with the Holy Spirit could not be a “divine child in human form”, but a half human and half divine “monster”. I wonder if Bishop Spong has ever heard of Francis Collins, formerly the head of the Human Genome Project, and a committed Christian. Dr. Collins’ book, The Language Of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief, is proof that you can understand modern genetics and still find theism “operative”.

As for the “exit” story, Bishop Spong asserts that astronomy disproves the Ascension. First Century Christians, he explains, imagined a three-tiered universe, in which Heaven was located just above the sky, so “to get to heaven, where God dwelt, one simply had to rise, as Jesus did in the ascension story, into the sky. But when Copernicus and Galileo challenged the accuracy of the three-tiered universe, they rendered this possibility null and void.” Can Bishop Spong really suppose that any serious Christian would find her faith rendered “inoperative” by the discovery of the stratosphere? To the best of my knowledge, even Biblical literalists who insist that the Earth was created in seven days in 4004 BC because “that’s what the Bible says” don’t deny the existence of the upper atmosphere, or even interplanetary space, on the basis of the Ascension story.

What Bishop Spong is refuting is not Christianity, but some weird parody of Christianity that he has created in his own imagination. This is a simplistic, village atheist performance that isn’t even challenging enough to be interesting.

But what is interesting is that, having asserted that theism is dead, Bishop Spong can’t stop talking about God. He proclaims that “the reality of the God-experience overwhelms me every day of my life.” “I have walked beyond theism,” he says, “but not beyond God”. The reader may be perplexed – I am perplexed – about what the heck he is talking about when he speaks of a “post-theistic God, the God who is not a person but the source of that power that nurtures personhood”, a God that is “nebulous and yet as real as a holy presence”, “a symbol of that which is immortal, invisible, timeless”, “the reality underlying everything that is”, “the ultimate source of life”. Go figure.

Bishop Spong even argues that the death of theism needn’t deprive us of our Jesus. He asserts that “I cannot remember a time when Jesus was not important to me”. For him, he says, Christ “is the source of godly empowerment who calls me beyond my boundaries”; he is “not an example to follow”, but “a vision that compels”, “the doorway through which I enter the holiness of God”. This may not make much sense, but give Spong credit for one thing: Unlike some modern “followers of Jesus”, he avoids the cop-out of claiming that Jesus was a great moral teacher who we should follow but not deify. “The content of Jesus’ teaching,” Bishop Spong concedes, “was not terribly original.”

So, if Christ is not the Son of God (because there is no “theistic God” to be his Father), and if he was just run-of-the-mill as a moral teacher, how does Christ become a compelling vision, a doorway into the holiness of the post-theistic God? Bishop Spong’s answer seems to be simply that in our western culture, we’ve inherited “Jesus, who is called Christ” as “the primary symbol in our faith-story”, and the “Christ-figure will continue to be our central icon, the gift we have to offer the world.”

I puzzled over these assertions for several days after I finished this book, and I went back and re-read several parts of it to be sure I hadn’t missed something. I’ve concluded that Bishop Spong really means what he says. He really does feel a “God-experience” while he nevertheless denies the reality of a (theistic) God; he really does find that a First Century rabbi with nothing original to say is his “doorway” into “the holiness of [the non-theistic] God.” He’s apparently able to do this because he’s been steeped in religion – and particularly the Christian religion – his whole life. He finds that he can still enjoy the feeling of being Christian, can use the name of “Christian”, even though he’s rejected the substance of Christianity. I understand that a person who has had a limb amputated may continues to feel a phantom sensation as though the missing limb were still there. This may be something like what Bishop Spong feels about God and Christ.

Phantom religious faith may work for Bishop Spong, and it may work for some others, but I don’t think it can work for the church, not for long. I’m typing this post on my laptop. If I pull out the power plug, I can still continue to type for some period of time on battery power. But after a while, I must either plug back in, or my screen will go dark. You may be able to enjoy the God-experience for a while without God, but if you don’t plug back into the source of that experience, your screen will go dark.

Bishop Spong thinks that in the modern, secular era, “we” can no longer believe in a (theistic) God and a Christ who is the Son of that God. If Christianity is to survive, he claims, it must radically transform itself into the non-theistic faith he advocates. Yet when I look around, I find thriving churches that unapologetically worship the theistic God that Spong says is no longer viable in this age. If Spong were right, shouldn’t we see people flocking to “non-theistic” churches? Have I missed that? Try a little thought experiment with me. Suppose a new church were opened in your community, and the pastor announced that its services would “celebrate the long human journey from the first form of life in a single cell to the complexity of our modern, fearful, human self-consciousness.” (This is the liturgy of the future, according to Bishop Spong.) How many congregants do you think that church would have after six months?

I don’t dispute that Christian churches face a modernity challenge today. We sometimes use archaic language that fails to convey the true meaning of our faith to contemporary listeners. We sometimes hang on to practices and traditions that no longer make sense in today’s world. Some of our churches still revel in the glories of the Middle Ages, while others embrace the modern world up to, but not including, 1859. We do have to change, but we don’t have to give up God and we don’t have to give up Christ. Spong is wrong about that.

On the contrary. Rather than water down the Christian message to a mere “icon”, as Bishop Spong would have us do, we need to proclaim it with confidence. But we need to proclaim it in language that modern listeners can understand. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit gave the first Christians the gift of languages, so they could speak the word of God to those around them, each in his own tongue. The language changed, but not the message.

Bishop Spong says that “we Christians today know that we possess neither certainty nor eternal truth.” A mission for Christian education, it seems to me, is to prove him wrong.