[Dialogue] Spong on theism and its alternatives

[Janice & Abe Ulangca]

Wow!   What a thought-provoking essay from Spong.

When I have more time (sometime in July!) I'll share with you about a phenomenal curriculum series called "Living the Questions".   Good procedures for 2 1/2 hour sessions, including a 30-minute DVD with pithy bits from folks like John (they call him Jack) Spong, Marcus Borg, Dominic Crossan, 15 or so other scholars.  Then good conversation questions, discussion in pairs & plenary, experiencing various kinds of spiritual practices.  25 of us heretics - half peace & justice folks, half other seekers, from 8 congregations have just started this 12 week series, and are having a great time.  We'll all need to miss a week or 2 sometime this summer, but want to get in on all we can.  Two Methodist clergy, 1 Catholic priest among the group.  Exciting.

Janice Ulangca
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: KroegerD at aol.com 
  To: MICAH6-8 at topica.com 
  Cc: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net 
  Sent: Thursday, June 16, 2005 1:31 PM
  Subject: [Dialogue] Spong on theism and its alternatives



  June 15, 2005 
  Can One Be Christian  Without Being a Theist? 
  As one who lectures extensively across this nation and the world, I have been 
   asked questions by my audiences that have ranged from the naive to the 
  profound,  from the obvious to the obtuse. Some have been hostile, designed to 
  embarrass,  attack, and minimize. Some have been seeking in the wasteland some 
  hint that the  living water of faith might yet be available. No one, however, has 
  ever  confronted me with a question at once so penetrating and yet so 
  devastating as  the one with which I began this column.  
  It was articulated several years ago not by a critic of the Christian Faith  
  but by a deeply committed layperson who had even thought for a time about  
  seeking ordination. It went to the very core of the contemporary theological  
  debate and forced me to think in a brand new direction. Theism is the historic  
  way men and women have been taught to think about God and most people think it  
  is the only conceivable way to think about God.  
  The primary image of God in the Bible is surely the theistic image; that is a 
   God conceived of as a Being, supernatural in power, external to this world 
  but  periodically invading it to answer prayers or rescue a person or nation in 
   distress. This theistic Being is inevitably portrayed in human terms as a 
  person  who has a will, who loves, rewards, and punishes. Although one can find 
  other  images of God in the scriptures, this is the predominant and familiar 
  one.  
  Theism is also the understanding of God revealed in the liturgies of the  
  Christian churches where we meet God as one who desires praise, elicits  
  confession, reveals the divine will, and calls us into the spiritual life of  
  communion with this divine Being.  
  So dominant is this definition of God that to reject theism is to be an  
  a-theist. An atheist is one who denies the theistic concept of God and, since  
  theism exhausts most peoples' definition of God, that is heard to be saying  
  there is no God. So when one is confronted with the question, "Can one be a  
  Christian without being a theist?" the door is opened to much theological  
  speculation. This question can only be asked when one lives in a world where the  
  traditional theistic view of God has become inoperative because of the explosion  
  in human knowledge over the last five hundred years.  
  We once attributed to the will of this deity everything we did not  
  understand, from sickness to tragedy to sudden death to extreme weather  patterns. But 
  today sickness is diagnosed and treated with no reference to God  whatsoever. 
  Tragedies like the attack on the World Trade Center, tornadoes,  floods and 
  tsunamis are investigated by this secular society without much  reference to the 
  will of God. That was certainly not the case when things like  the Black 
  Death or the bubonic plague, swept across the world. When death  strikes suddenly 
  today, we do autopsies that reveal a massive coronary occlusion  or a cerebral 
  hemorrhage as the cause. We do not speculate on why this external  Deity 
  might have wanted to punish this particular person with sudden death. Even  what 
  the insurance companies still call "acts of God" are today thought to be  
  completely explainable in nontheistic language. We chart the formation of  
  hurricanes from the time when they develop as low pressure systems in the  southern 
  oceans and we mark their paths until these weather systems are broken  up. No 
  meteorologist I know of refers to these phenomena of nature as divinely  caused 
  to inflict godly punishment upon a wayward region, people, or nation.  
  One English priest and theologian, Michael Goulder, became an atheist when he 
   decided the way he had traditionally conceived of God was nonsensical since, 
  in  his words, God "no longer has any work to do." This God no longer cures  
  sicknesses, directs the weather, fights wars, punishes sinners or rewards  
  faithfulness. The idea of an external supernatural deity who invades human  
  affairs periodically to impose the divine will, though still given lip service  in 
  worship settings, has died culturally. If God is identified exclusively with  
  the theistic understanding of God, then it is fair to say that culturally God  
  has ceased to live in our world.  
  If the theistic understanding of God exhausts the human experience of God,  
  then the answer to the question of the layperson is clear. No, it is not  
  possible to be a Christian without being a theist. But if God can be envisioned  in 
  some way other than inside the theistic categories of our religious past,  
  then perhaps a doorway into a new religious future can be opened. To make that  
  transition is what I regard as the most pressing theological issue of this  
  generation.  
  Christianity has been shaped by traditional theistic concepts. Jesus was  
  identified in some sense as the incarnation of the theistic God. It was said  
  that he came to do "the Father's (read: the external supernatural supreme  
  Being's) will." Indeed, Jesus was portrayed as a sacrifice offered to this God  to 
  bring an end to human estrangement from the Creator. Theologians talked of  
  original sin and "the fall," to which, it was asserted, the cross spoke with  
  healing power and in which drama of salvation the shed blood of Jesus played a  
  central role. But in a world that has abandoned any theological sense of  
  offering sacrifices to an angry deity, what could this interpretation of the  cross 
  of Christ possibly mean? In a post-Darwinian world, where creation is not  
  finished but is even now ongoing and ever expanding, the idea of a fall from a  
  perfect world into sin and estrangement is nonsensical. The idea that somehow  
  the very nature of the heavenly God required the death of Jesus as a ransom 
  to  be paid for our sins is ludicrous. A human parent who required the death of 
  his  or her child as a satisfaction for a relationship that had been broken 
  would be  either arrested or confined to a mental institution. Yet behavior we 
  have come  to abhor in human beings is still a major part of the language of 
  worship in our  churches. It is the language of our ancient theistic 
  understanding of God. It is  also language doomed to irrelevance and revulsion. At this 
  point the real  question thus becomes, "Can Christianity be separated from 
  ancient theistic  concepts and still be a living faith?" That is why this inquiry 
  from this  layperson was such a threatening, scary question. Once it is 
  raised to  consciousness, it will never go away and will destabilize forever the 
  only  understanding of God most of us have ever had.  
  The "religious right" does not understand the issues involved here. On the  
  other hand, the secular society where God has been dismissed from life has also 
   answered this question by living as if there is no God. Only those who can 
  first  raise this question into consciousness, and who then refuse to sacrifice 
  their  sense of the reality of God when all theistic concepts fail, will ever 
  entertain  or address these issues. This debate already rages in the 
  theological academy  where God has not been spoken of as an external, supernatural 
  Being,  periodically invading the world, in decades. Yet the experience of God as 
  divine  presence found in the midst of life is all but universally attested. 
  Jesus as a  revelation of this divine presence is at the heart of the 
  Christian claim, but  the way it has traditionally been processed and transmitted is 
  now all but  universally rejected by the academy.  
  So perhaps the major theological task of our times is to seek a new language  
  in which to translate the premodern theistic categories into the postmodern,  
  nontheistic language of tomorrow. The religious leader who does not address  
  these issues offers little more than an unbelievable 'opiate for the people.' 
  I  cannot begin to say how much the posing of this frontier question about the 
   relationship between the Christian faith and the theistic language of the 
  past  encouraged me from that day to this. It is the crucial concept in 
  developing a  revolution in theological inquiry. Most Christology seeks to explain how 
  the  external theistic deity could be met in the person of Jesus. Most moral 
  theology  is based on the assumption that a theistic deity will dispense 
  reward or  punishment. Most prayer is addressed to an external theistic deity who 
  has the  power to answer those prayers with an act of miraculous intervention. 
  Most  liturgy is directed toward this external theistic deity. Theism is 
  therefore the  lynchpin that once pulled brings the traditional formulations of the 
  Christian  faith crashing down. Reformation and the future life of the 
  Christian church  depends on the ability of the contemporary Christian to dismiss 
  theism as an  adequate explanation of God, without dismissing the God experience 
  and even the  God experience in Jesus as unreal. It is no wonder this debate 
  scares so many.  
  The present split in the developed Christian world between fundamentalism and 
   a growing secularity rises out of this very issue. The fundamentalists (who 
  come  in both a Protestant and a catholic version) refuse to engage the issue 
  because  they see no way out. The secular humanists embrace the debate but see 
  no value  left in traditional Christianity. My vocation has become to dismiss 
  the theistic  explanations without dismissing the God experience. Check with 
  me in fifty years  and I will tell you whether or not I have succeeded. 
  -- John Shelby Spong 
  Question and Answer
  With John Shelby  Spong 
  Marcia Wadsworth, via the Internet, writes:  
  Why do others such as Tim LaHaye and certain church groups, who I presume are 
   well educated on biblical matters, insist that every word in the Bible is  
  inerrant. Have they never been introduced to Biblical criticism? Could they be  
  afraid to question?  
  Dear Marcia,  
  Religion is a strange and sometimes even an irrational thing. People have an  
  amazing ability to compartmentalize learning so that various things never 
  have  to interact in their minds. So it is that apparently educated people can  
  actually suspend their thought processes and reject evolution for "creation  
  science," seek to deny that homosexuality is a given rather than a chosen way of 
   life or even believe that miracles occur whenever they pray for them. It is 
  not  that their minds are closed so much as it is that they cannot allow 
  anything  into their minds that threatens the core of their security-giving 
  religious  faith. As I get older, I am impressed by two constant truths  
      1.  It is not easy to be human. Anxiety and mortality have to be embraced 
  by  self-conscious creatures and that is what makes our humanity so unique 
  among  the creatures of this earth.  
      2.  Religion is primarily a search for security and not a search for 
  truth.  Religion is what we so often use to bank the fires of our anxiety. That is 
  why  religion tends toward becoming excessive, neurotic, controlling and even 
  evil.  That is why a religious government is always a cruel government. 
  People need to understand that questioning and doubting are healthy,  human 
  activities to be encouraged not to be feared. Certainly is a vice not a  
  virtue. Insecurity is something to be grasped and treasured. A true and healthy  
  religious system will encourage each of these activities. A sick and fearful  
  religious system will seek to remove them.  
  --John Shelby Spong  
   
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