[Dialogue] Spong in Germany

[KroegerD at aol.com]

January 10, 2006 
A Conversation in Grebenstein,  Germany  

While on a lecture tour of Europe this winter, we had one stop in  
Grebenstein, Germany, that was unique in many ways. No lecture, press conference  or 
even a meeting with some ecclesiastical leader was scheduled here. We were  
simply responding to an invitation from a retired Lutheran pastor, named Gerhard  
Klein, who had translated two of my books into German and was working on a  
third. He had also lobbied the German publishing industry until one of them,  
Patmos Publishing Company of Dusseldorf, bought the rights from Harper-Collins  
to bring out Why Christianity Must Change or Die three years ago. It was 
Gerhard  Klein's translation they published. For a book whose author prior to this 
time  had never lectured in Germany, it did well. So Patmos Press then accepted 
this  man's translation of A New Christianity for a New World. It came out 
just  recently. A third translation of "The Sins of Scripture" is now set for  
publication late in 2007. All of this time I had no idea first, that these  
negotiations were going on and second, why this man had developed so deep a  
fascination for my writing.  
Translating a book is an all-consuming task. This is especially true when the 
 translator has a passion to bring the message of that book to the attention 
of  his own country. The work that Gerhard had done meant that over the last 
three  years he had been interacting with my words on a daily basis. It was out 
of that  experience that he wrote to invite us to come for a visit while I 
was in Europe.  We accepted his invitation and placed Grebenstein into our 
itinerary. While my  books have now been translated into almost every European 
language (plus Korean  and Arabic), I normally do not meet the translators. The 
exceptions to this have  only been in Sweden and Finland. So while this was an 
unusual request, it was  one to which I looked forward.  
Gerhard Klein met us at the Frankfurt station after an overnight train ride  
from Paris. Since we had no idea what he looked like and perhaps even more  
significantly, knew nothing of his life story, we scanned the faces in the crowd 
 as we came into the terminal. However, because the covers on my books have 
my  picture on them he knew what I looked like and he made the correct 
assumption  that the woman who accompanied me off the train was my wife. He and 
Christine  had exchanged so many e-mails in preparation for this visit that they 
thought of  each other as old friends. As we stepped off the train he said, 
"Christine?" and  they embraced and did the continental kiss on each cheek. We then 
drove about  ten miles out of Frankfurt before stopping at a roadside inn for 
breakfast.  After a nine hour train ride it was the best cup of coffee I have 
ever had. We  talked incessantly on this trip in wonderful waves of 
self-discovery. Born in  1930, Gerhard was just a lad when Hitler came into power in 
Germany. His  childhood was spent in war. He knew what it was like to be bombed, 
to be  separated from his mother and not to know whether or not she had been 
killed in  a bombing attack. He knew the pain of being loyal to his native 
land while  deploring its Nazi government. He had watched with horror the 
treatment of  Jewish people, including those close to his family like his mother's  
obstetrician. The Christian Church of Germany split into two groups over 
Hitler.  One, called the German Church was pro-Hitler. Yes, the Christian Church can 
be  and has been manipulated into supporting various governments in power. 
Political  seduction is a heady temptation, but every time leaders of the 
Christian Church  have tied themselves to a particular political movement they have 
been badly  used. Read what Billy Graham has to say about Richard Nixon in his 
autobiography  or, better yet, listen to what Richard Nixon said on his tapes 
about Billy  Graham. For an even later example read Richard Hu's book about 
how the Bush  administration treated the religious right, which it courted so 
assiduously and  served so poorly.  
The other part of the German Church became disenfranchised and, in a kind of  
government imposed exile, began to call itself "The Confessing Church." 
Members  of this movement opposed the Hitler regime so totally that some of them 
even  engaged in a plot to assassinate their Fuhrer. This 1943 plot ended in 
failure  when someone inadvertently moved the bomb-laden briefcase to the other 
side of  the table at which Hitler was sitting. For Christians to contemplate 
the murder  of the head of state is surely either the work of fanatical zealots 
or the act  of sober men in desperate straits. History alone can make that 
judgment. Two of  the leaders of this group were pastors, Martin Niemöller and 
Dietrich  Bonhöeffer. Niemöller spent most of the war in jail under the strange 
 designation of "Hitler's personal prisoner." Even the Gestapo did not know 
how  to interpret that designation. Bonhoeffer was an active participant in the 
 Hitler assassination attempt. When it failed, he was arrested and 
incarcerated  in a prison camp in Flossenburg. Two weeks before the Allied armies freed 
that  prison camp, the Nazis hanged him. With his death one of the most 
fertile minds  of the young generation of World War II Christian thinkers was 
silenced for  ever, leaving us with only nuggets to contemplate of what his future 
might have  been. It was Bonhoeffer who called for something he referred to as 
"Religionless  Christianity." My own quest to discover what I have called 
"Jesus for the  Non-Religious" is deeply rooted in his thought. Bonhoeffer was 
terribly  important to Gerhard Klein, for he saw in him one who could be deeply 
German and  militantly anti-Hitler at the same time. That helped heal the wound 
that World  War II produced in this young man's soul.  
Through a circuitous route, Gerhard decided to study theology and, some ten  
years after the conclusion of the war, was ordained a Lutheran pastor. His 
mind,  however, continued to wander far beyond the confines of typical church 
life. A  brilliant man, he read constantly. He knew well the debates that went on 
in the  academies of theological learning that were, however, never allowed 
to be voiced  in the comfortable pews of the German Lutheran churches. He was 
aware of the  German contribution to biblical scholarship, from the 
Graf-Wellhausen school of  thought that opened up the Hebrew Scriptures to the work of 
Rudolf Bultmann, who  changed New Testament scholarship for all time, making the 
word  "demythologizing" part of the biblical vocabulary of the 20th century. 
However,  Gerhard never found a way to make this scholarship part of the faith 
of the  people he was serving as a pastor. He later moved to Australia to 
build there a  congregation of German Lutherans free of so much of the 
traditional church  trappings. People in the Lutheran church respected his mind and his 
learning,  but they were, however, never comfortable with his lack of 
allegiance to the  established structures. He returned to Frankfurt serving as head of 
a major  church in the old quarter of that city and as the person who 
spearheaded for  German Lutherans the dialogue between the Church and the world of 
business. His  special concern was making Christianity available to working 
class people who  did not think in terms of classical theological categories. His 
last pastorate  was in the city of Kassel, near the village of Grebenstein, 
where he retired  with his lovely and wonderful wife. In retirement he 
experienced a growing  anxiety that there was so much more to Christianity than he had 
been able to  communicate in his ministry. One day, while visiting his son in 
Australia, he  turned on the television set and by some strange fate happened 
upon an interview  with an American bishop who at that moment was lecturing 
across Australia on his  newest book, "Why Christianity Must Change or Die." 
That is how Gerhard Klein  came to know about Bishop Spong. He went out the next 
day and bought the book.  By the time he returned to Germany, he was intent on 
translating it and getting  it published. From that day to this, he has lived 
inside my mind. When he wrote  and invited us to spend a day with him, it 
fitted neatly into our schedule and  so the remarkable conversation in 
Grebenstein took place.  
Never before have I met a person who shared so deeply my vision for the  
Church, and one who groaned as I do under the weight of the security-giving  
delusion, that for so many passes today as religion. We are close in age with  only 
seven months separating our dates of birth. We both had difficult  
experiences in our early lives that shaped our characters; he in Nazi Germany  with its 
anti-Semitism; I in my southern homeland with its racism of  segregation. Both 
of us have seen a Church we love deeply compromised: he with  the German 
Church that supported Hitler and I with the Christian Church of the  South that 
supported segregation and that today in so many of its forms supports  a 
destructive homophobia. Both of us stood against the tide in our church's life  and 
suffered the abuse of a threatened institution. Both of us learned how to  
stand for our vision of what the Church could be and knew what it meant to be  
voices crying in the wilderness. Both of us lived long enough to see ourselves  
vindicated and even appreciated. He today lives in a Nazi-free Germany and the  
Confessing Church with which Gerhard identified as a child is now the core of 
 German Lutheranism. I live today in a church that in my home diocese of 
North  Carolina has elected an African-American to be its bishop, in which the 
people  of New Hampshire have elected and this church has confirmed an openly gay 
man,  living in a faithful partnership, to be their bishop and into whose 
highest  office of leadership we have elevated a strikingly-competent woman as 
our  Primate, Presiding Bishop and Chief Pastor. That is a long way from the  
segregated, anti-female, homophobic church of my childhood. Leadership makes a  
difference. So does standing for truth even when it is unpopular. Spending 
time  with Gerhard Klein in Germany made me newly aware that no one, no matter 
how  misguided, whether he be the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury or even the 
 President of the United States, can finally prevent truth from emerging in  
history. As one hymn writer put it: "God is working his purpose out as year  
succeeds to year." Gerhard Klein reaffirmed that faith for me in the village of 
 Grebenstein, Germany. I am glad our paths crossed.  
John Shelby Spong  
_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 
Edwin, via the Internet, writes:  
I subscribe to the teachings of Christ and regularly attend the United  
Methodist Church. However, my question is this: Is "God" or "Yahweh" really a  
defined word? Here is my reason for suspecting that it is not. "One" is a  
pronoun. The pronoun "one" in the dictionary definition of the nouns "creator"  and 
"ruler" (one that creates/rules) - which is contained in what the  
lexicographers allege to be a definition of "God" and publish in their  dictionaries - has 
never been assigned an antecedent and no antecedent seems  possible. If this 
is the case, then the alleged definition of "God" is not a  definition at all. 
You can't define a noun only as a pronoun with no possible  antecedent. That 
seems to be a language trick used in alleged definitions of  "God." 
Oftentimes, the word "spirit" is given as the antecedent of "one."  However, a similar 
question can be asked about the meaningfulness of the word  "spirit." Can you 
expound on this?  
Dear Edwin,  
Of course God is not a defined word though many people seem quite sure they  
know exactly what it means. My sense is that we can experience God inside the  
limits of our human frame of reference, but no person can tell another person 
 either who God is or what God is.  
To make people conscious of that, I ask whether or not a moth or an insect  
can tell you what it is like to be a bird. Can an insect escape the frame of  
reference in which an insect lives in order to describe a whole new level of  
reality? Can a horse tell another horse what it is like to be a human being? 
Can  a horse step outside the realm of a horse's consciousness to describe a 
realm of  being they have no way of understanding? Can a human being escape the 
limits of  our humanity to describe God? What makes us think God can fit into a 
human  consciousness? Is that not why all our pictures of God wind up being 
an expanded  human being? It was a Greek philosopher named Xenophanes who said, 
"If horses  had Gods, they would look like horses!"  
Your exercise from the world of grammar may be reflective of the fact that  
defining God is not within the capacity of our human competence.  
True religion is always religion beyond propositional creeds and defined  
doctrines. Creeds and doctrines at best point us to God. They never capture God.  
That is why I believe that religion must always fade into mysticism. It must  
move beyond creeds, beyond certainty and finally beyond words. That is not an 
 easy realization for many who use religion as a security system and who need 
 certainty for security's sake and who always turn religion into idolatry.  
I hope this helps.  
John Shelby Spong 
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