[Dialogue] Spongs next guest

[KroegerD@aol.com]

June 22, 2005 
Dear Friends,  
This week I take great pleasure in introducing you to one of the most  
exciting voices in 21st century Christianity. The Reverend Gretta Vosper is an  
ordained pastor in the United Church of Canada, a church that came into being  
through an early 20th century merger primarily between the Presbyterians and the  
Methodists in Canada. She has in the past few years emerged in our northern  
neighbour as the leading voice for a scholarly and progressive Christianity. A 
 brilliant, insightful and courageous young woman, she has already been 
subjected  to moves by the fundamentalist part of her church to place her on trial 
for  heresy. She is today at the center of the theological debate in Canada. 
In  addition to her parochial responsibilities, Gretta organized and now serves 
as  the head and convener of what they call "The Canadian Centre for 
Progressive  Christianity" (note the Canadian spelling of Centre). I treasure the 
opportunity  I have to give her voice a wider audience through this column. I 
welcome your  responses to her article (write to support at johnshelbyspong.com) and 
if the  volume of mail justifies it, I will publish portions of that mail as 
part of a  subsequent column.  
-- John Shelby Spong  
Poised! 
A crowd of almost 500 gathered last fall to celebrate the launching of "The  
Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity." Its development in Canada had  
been encouraged by the founder and president of America's "Center for  
Progressive Christianity," the Rev. Jim Adams of Cambridge, Mass. Those of us  who 
helped create this Centre sensed the urgency of its mission as stories of  
isolation and rejection within communities of faith emerged.  
For some the stories came from small communities or remote towns and  
villages, where 'church' meant only one traditional option that could not  provide 
the resources to support those who looked for God outside literal boxes.  
Congregational leaders too often took the safe route at the expense of relevance  to 
both knowledge and culture. Those with progressive perspectives found  
themselves either outside congregational comfort zones or squeezed into  traditions 
with which they were at odds.  
For others, isolation existed in large communities. Congregations, well known 
 and long-loved, had become places where the mysteries of faith could be  
discussed only within traditional boundaries and adherence to long-revered  
doctrines was more highly esteemed than spiritual maturity. Those who remained  
were silenced by the pressure of conformity, feeling alone among others they  
once counted as friends. Those who left experienced the bereavement of that  
choice.  
For the ordained, their call demanded a choice either to give in to  
orthodoxy's tyranny or give up on the church. The ones who gave in lived with a  
disconnect; those who let go lived with the stigma of abandoning the church,  
despite productive lives in other holistic professions.  
Over the past centuries, philosophers, theologians, and biblical scholars  
have pressed for a more progressive Christianity. In the 18th century,  
philosopher Immanuel Kant argued for a church that promoted reason-based moral  
living, not humanly created requirements beyond the bounds of love. Biblical  
criticism is even older. Some hundred years earlier, Benedict de Spinoza pointed  
out the many inconsistencies in the Bible by juxtaposing different passages of  
the Pentateuch and arguing for a human, not a divine, origin. In the past two  
centuries, volumes of "progressive" theological, scriptural and ecclesial  
scholarship have been written.  
Quite naturally, within seminaries and theological centres in Canada, the  
study of theology, the Bible, and church history includes much of this  
scholarship. Students are exposed to many sources that understand the Bible  (and, 
therefore, everything predicated upon it) as a human construction, written  by 
beings as fallible and as equally subject to the prejudices of context as are  
they. A critical approach to scripture with its many hermeneutical models,  
including historical and contextual criticism, often helps replace the  
simplistic faith of beginning seminarians with an understanding of the many ways  human 
beings have attempted to describe their relationship with the divine. With  
that as a foundation, many are able to build for themselves, a strong and 
mature  Christian faith. It has really only been in the last few decades, however, 
that  scholarship regularly avail-able to theological students in seminaries 
has  become accessible to the general public. The mission of the Westar 
Institute, in  its quest for the historical Jesus, has provided and promoted 
scholarship in a  manner that has interested and engaged many, not just theologians 
and seminary  students. Works by Bishop John Spong and Marcus Borg have been 
repeatedly named  as entrances into a liberated sense of faith. Avid readers 
hungrily consume  their works and move on to books by such authors as Karen 
Armstrong, Robert  Funk, Tom Harpur, Richard Holloway, Elaine Pagels, and Jack 
Nelson-Palmeyer.  Those who wish to go further reach for the published theological 
challenges of  non-realist Don Cupitt, religious humanist David Boulton, and 
Lloyd Geering,  whose insightful works look at the world beyond the confines of 
Christendom,  sending out the call: Christianity and beyond!  
Accessing this kind of writing has been an exhilarating journey for many lay  
people. In study groups across Canada, and, I'm sure, around the world,  
congregational members are meeting to discuss books which might well be labelled  
by the more traditional as not merely provocative, but disturbing or 
heretical.  The eagerness with which groups engage in dis-covering the Bible and the 
roots  of Christianity can be likened to that found in the eyes of those who 
eagerly  watch a magician expose the secrets of her trade. "Ah!" they cry, 
smiling and  nodding, "That's how it was done!" Similarly, when what various 
churches calls  "orthodox" is as carefully examined, that which has only ever been 
seen through  the magic cloth of "faith," is exposed and may be set aside. Over 
and over  again, people experience an immense liberation as they are freed 
from the weight  of the traditional beliefs that have bound the church to 
antiquity. They become  excited about the possibilities of exploring faith beyond its 
former limitations  - a faith that calls for just and compassionate living, 
with no extra  requirements of either belief or ritual, leading them to imagine 
a new kind of  church experience. This is the challenging and thrilling place 
where we now find  ourselves poised.  
I use the word "poised" rather than "stuck" even though I know there will be  
those who feel my optimism is ill-founded. I feel we are poised between what 
has  been and what might yet be. It not only sounds better, but we've 
developed the  Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity precisely because we 
believe that  there is a promising tomorrow for the church, an achievable goal, and 
we are  only just beginning to make our way through to a new possibility-a 
new  Christianity.  
But, to be honest, it often does feel like we are "stuck." You know exactly  
what I mean if you have experienced or witnessed the exhilaration that rises  
when someone completes his or her first Spong or Borg book - the excitement of 
 finding a faith can make sense, one that doesn't require losing our minds, 
one  that has meaning in today's world - and then watch the excitement fade as 
the  realities of the average Christian church are encountered. For many, 
regardless  of what we have discovered, or of what scales have fallen from our 
eyes, if we  want to gather with a community of faith that might share some of 
these ideas,  we find ourselves back in church, which in most cases and to 
varying degrees, is  still gripped by centuries- old traditions, which cause it to 
speak and to sing  in theologically mystifying language, still chortling in 
self deprecation at its  "glacial" pace regarding new ideas. The progressive 
understandings of the Bible  and tradition instilled in those preparing for 
church leadership somehow never  made it from the seminary to the pew. Percolating 
within a cloistered academia,  after decades, if not centuries, they moved out 
to the welcoming public sphere  but almost completely bypassed the church, 
barely touching or disturbing its  ethereal solitude, while the church continued 
on, oblivious to the widening pit  surrounding it. In the Canadian Centre for 
Progressive Christianity we believe  that the church is still exquisitely 
poised to call forth positive change in  individuals. Personal change is the 
nexus of change in the world. Without it, we  can remain caught in the grip of 
systems that do not honour the sacred or  recognize the spiritual side of 
humanity or creation-systems that attribute no  value to the human experience beyond 
self-gratification. Our position carries  responsibility. Placing spiritual 
values-love, forgiveness, justice, peace,  compassion-at the centre of our 
lives, and naming those values as worthy, is the  essence of worship. Worship that 
remains hidden under the carapace of ritual,  symbol and tradition that has 
beautifully adorned and represented our former  theological understandings is 
now meaningless to many. Some see the solution in  validating the old by 
reinterpreting traditional language and rituals, arguing  that the very weight of 
them actually creates space wherein the divine can be  experienced. Others of us 
believe that doing so only maintains church as a  closed community, excluding 
the many who experience those very aspects of church  as serious barriers to 
the holy. Reinterpretation may be one route; re-creation  may be another.  
Our call is to develop places within the church where what we have read,  
studied and know can be seen, heard and celebrated. We will seek to remove  
language that upholds theological perspectives that are no longer relevant and  
develop new ways to speak of that which is sacred. We need to stop singing  
hymns, saying prayers and participating in rituals that put all the  responsibility 
for the world in the hands of a deity somewhere "out there," even  if 
everyone already in the church has long-since rationalized the words to mean  
something else, for we must begin to acknowledge the weight of our own  
responsibility for ourselves, each other and the world. It is time to develop a  language 
of integrity within the church, especially in worship, and to hold  ourselves 
accountable to those scholars who have gone before us, whose work has  informed 
us and continues to open before us new and exciting ways to be in  
relationship with the world and all that is sacred within it.  
So we are poised to enter this new world and to be at the forefront of its  
unfolding. We do it humbly, recognizing that we walk upon a path long-trodden 
by  those men and women, spiritual leaders, who have gone before us; we seek to 
 honour them as we work toward a vision of the possibilities inherent in the  
responsibilities we share. It has long been their vision and it is now ours.  
-- Gretta Vosper  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Phyllis Strupp from Carefree, Arizona, asks:  
Do you think that the Church has adequately explored and explained the  
spiritual aspects of evolution? What does it mean spiritually that we evolved  from 
apes?  
Dear Phyllis,  
In a word my answer to your first question is a very loud NO! Evolution has  
always threatened traditional Christianity. That is why Charles Darwin is so  
vigorously attacked, even today, in some religious circles. However, the fact 
is  that the typical religious attack on Darwin is light years away from the 
place  where Darwin made his impact on traditional understanding.  
Darwin shattered biblical literalism and its seven-day creation story. The  
critics of Darwin, unable to meet this challenge, finally accommodated Darwin 
by  suggesting that each of the days referred to in the creation story might 
have  represented eons of time and that the evolutionary method might therefore 
be  accurate. They believed that this compromise left them with the claim of  
biblical accuracy still in tact. It was a shallow and papered-over peace  
destined not to last. It only served to keep the Darwinian wolf away from the  
Christian door for another 100 years.  
Eventually, the real Darwinian challenge became visible and, when it did, the 
 whole interpretative myth by which Christianity presented its faith system 
began  to crumble. That myth asserted that in the beginning was a good creation 
at  which time all things bore witness to God's perfection. Then there came 
an act  of rebellion - told in the Garden of Eden story as an act of disobeying 
God's  only prohibition that forbade the eating of the fruit from the Tree of 
the  Knowledge of Good and Evil. This act plunged the world into a state of 
sin and  separation from which there was no way of escape that was open to the 
fallen  creature. Even God seemed unable to overcome the fall. The flood at 
the time of  Noah was designed to destroy all living things so that God could 
begin anew with  an unfallen world. However, even the righteous Noah still 
possessed the human  weakness that resulted, we are told, from the fall so sin was 
still present in  the human race. Next at Mt. Sinai, we are told that God sent 
the law to guide  human beings back to their original perfection. The fallen 
human creature was,  however, unable to keep God's precepts even when they 
were fully known. Then God  sent the prophets to recall at least the messianic 
people to God's purpose in  creation. However, the prophets were murdered and 
banished. Finally, the story  says "in the fullness of time" God entered human 
life in the person of Jesus,  who bore the punishment of the fall, was 
victimized by it and paid the price for  it in the crucifixion and overcame it in the 
Resurrection. Finally, the Church  was created in which baptism could wash 
from each newborn life the stain of the  fall and the Eucharist or the Mass could 
reenact, week by week, the drama of  salvation so that believers in every age 
could appropriate for themselves the  salvation offered on the cross of 
Calvary. This Christian myth constituted a  neat theological system and it has 
dominated theological thinking for most of  the 2000 years of Christian history. 
The only problem is that this myth is based  on an understanding of human 
origins that is simply wrong.  
Darwin forced us to acknowledge that there never was a finished and perfect  
creation. Creation, he asserted is an ongoing and unfinished process. Human 
life  is evolving from lower forms of life so it was, therefore, not created 
perfect.  If perfection was not our original definition, then we could not fall 
into sin,  not even metaphorically. This means that there never was something 
called "the  fall." Human beings cannot, therefore, be rescued from a fall that 
never  happened, nor can they be restored to a status that they have never 
possessed.  All life is in flux. That was the Darwinian insight. Our problem is 
not that we  are fallen sinners; our problem is that we have not yet become 
fully human. If  this is so then the old way of telling the Jesus story as the 
invading divine  rescuer of a fallen humanity no longer makes sense. To speak 
of a Christ, who  calls and empowers us to be more deeply and fully human, 
might be the new way to  tell that story. One thing is sure, until we find a new 
way, there is not much  hope for a Christian future.  
--John Shelby Spong  
 
____________________________________
 
____________________________________