[Dialogue] {Spam?} Spong 9-17 This is worth a read even you Cynthia

[KroegerD at aol.com]

September 12, 2007 
If Christianity Cannot Change,  It Will Die.  


Author's note: While in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald invited me to  
write an op-ed piece on the future of Christianity. I found that a particularly 
 interesting thing to do since both the Roman Catholics and the Anglicans of  
Sydney seem to me to live in a time warp and most of the citizens of that 
great  city are totally secular. There was, I decided, no better place in the 
world  than Sydney to look past the present for a glimpse of the future.That is,  
therefore, what I tried to do in this piece.  
John Shelby Spong 
Christianity as a religion of certainty and control is dying. The signs of  
that death are present in the emptiness of the churches of Europe, in the  
decline of candidates for the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church, in the  
increasing obsession about issues of sexuality that bedevil church leaders, and  
in the rising secularization of our society. It is also seen, however, in the  
hysterical fundamentalism that marks conservative Evangelicals and Catholics  
alike in our world today. Fundamentalism is not a virtue; it is a sign of 
being  out of touch with reality. Christianity is not dying because people are  
abandoning "revealed truth," as conservatives like to argue, but because the  
three major concepts of what was once called "revealed" truth are no longer  
credible today. These three concepts are: Christianity's definition of God,  
Christianity's definition of human life and Christianity's understanding of life  
after death. In this week's column I want to examine each of these concepts.  
The traditional understanding of God has defined the deity as "a Being"  
supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere outside this world, understood after  
the analogy of a human parent and capable of acting in protective and miraculous 
 ways. I call this "the theistic definition of God" and so deeply has it  
dominated Christian thought that one who cannot still believe in this theistic  
deity today is assumed to be "an atheist," and thus is said to believe in no 
God  at all. That accusation makes sense only if theism is the only way in which 
God  can be conceptualized. I do not believe that this is the case.  
Theism is dying because the expansion of human understanding about the size  
of the universe, begun with Copernicus and aided by Einstein and the Hubble  
telescope, has destroyed what we once assumed to be the theistic God's dwelling 
 place above the sky. That has the effect of dislocating our theistic 
mentality  in a total way. When Isaac Newton, some 50 years after Galileo, revealed 
to us  the precise ways in which the laws of the universe operate, the arena in 
which  our claims about miracles, magic and God's ability to act on our 
behalf shrank  perceptibly. The power of God to determine the weather patterns, so 
prominent in  the biblical stories of Noah, Moses and Elijah, was destroyed by 
our knowledge  about weather fronts, low pressure systems, El Nino winds and 
the ways in which  tectonic plates collide far beneath the earth's surface. 
The power of God to  control behavior by dispensing sickness and health was 
destroyed by the rise of  medical science and its understanding of both the causes 
and cures of sickness,  none of which had anything to do with punishment for 
not offering proper  sacrifices or not obeying the divinely inspired laws. As 
each new insight  removed one more arena in which the theistic God was thought 
to operate, this  God increasingly was reduced to impotence and had no more 
divine work to do.  Thus God became quickly and frighteningly an almost 
irrelevant and fading  presence in modern life. If there is no way to define our 
experience of God  except in theistic language, then there is little hope for this 
God's continued  survival.  
Next Christianity defined human life as that which had been created perfect  
in God's image at the dawn of history, but falling into sin by an act of 
willful  disobedience. This idea meant that human beings were now theologically 
defined  as lost and incapable of achieving salvation unless rescued by an 
external  divine power. Salvation meant being restored to our pre-fallen status and 
the  "savior" had to be seen as the emissary or even as the incarnation of the 
 theistic deity. It was against this background that the story of Jesus has  
traditionally been told. In that narrative, the cross became the place where 
our  salvation was procured by the death of Jesus. It was strange theology  
transforming God into a merciless judge, Jesus into the perpetual victim and you  
and me into being guilt ridden creatures. It was, however, so popular that 
the  words "Jesus died for my sins" became the Protestant mantra and this  
understanding of the cross as the place of divine sacrifice came to be reenacted  
weekly in the Mass as the heart of Catholic worship.  
It was the work of Charles Darwin, now deeply affirmed by the discovery of  
DNA that links all life into one unfolding whole, that rendered this Christian  
understanding of the origins of human life to be obsolete at best, dead wrong 
at  worst. Human beings have never possessed a perfection from which they 
could  fall. Original sin is thus a theological hoax. Human beings have evolved 
over  billions of years from single cells into our present self-conscious 
complexity.  We must be understood, therefore, as emerging creatures reaching out 
for a  humanity that we do not yet possess, not fallen creatures who yearn to 
be  rescued. So the heart of the way the Jesus story has traditionally been 
told has  also become irrelevant, inadequate and quite simply not so.  
Christianity's understanding of the afterlife has also depended traditionally 
 on the idea that God was a theistic, record-keeping deity, living above the  
clouds, before whom we would have to appear for judgment at the end of our 
days.  That understanding also depended on goodness and evil being objective 
categories  easy to define. That traditional idea of judgment portrayed us as 
chronically  immature people, who stood quietly before an authoritative parent 
figure sitting  on a throne to receive either a reward for our goodness or 
punishment for our  sinfulness. In either stance we were never to be allowed to 
grow beyond that  stage of life in which the child tries to win the parent's 
approval.  
Eighteenth century studies in cultural relativity made both truth and  
goodness hard to define. Nineteenth century studies in sociology revealed that  
human behavior is conditioned by our circumstances and that the relationship  
between hunger, education and poverty and the definition of evil are deeply  
present in the kind of evolutionary, competitive behavior that places the  highest 
value on survival even as it is served by lying, stealing and killing.  
Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo painted that portrait powerfully in their  novels. 
Twentieth century studies then established the psychological  interdependence 
of all life and showed us how it is that the "sins of the  fathers and the 
mothers are visited upon the children to the third and fourth  generations." This 
insight served to make assigning individual credit and blame  to be all but 
impossible. So how, a modern person might ask, can we stand before  the judgment 
of this theistic God?  
When these core aspects of our traditional faith story began to fade, it was  
not surprising that organized forms of Christianity began to fade with them. 
As  religious systems die two things always happen. First, those who cannot 
embrace  life without their religious certainties become frightened and begin to 
assert  yesterday's religious truths with great vigor and renewed passion. 
They become  the fundamentalists, the evangelicals and the conservative 
Catholics. They shout  their convictions loudly. They defend "revealed" truth 
vigorously, asserting  such strange ideas as papal infallibility and biblical 
inerrancy. They condemn  any one who disagrees with their convictions and they vow 
once again to conquer  the world for Christ. That kind of right wing religion is 
omni-present in this  generation. The second response is a significant rise in 
the number of dropouts  from organized religion altogether, a secularization 
of the whole society and an  increase in what might be called convinced 
humanism. This expression is also a  reality in the post Christian world of today. 
The sterile battles that go on  between the two manifestations of a dying 
Christianity are both public and  boring, since neither approach really engages the 
real issues nor offers a  viable solution.  
There is, however, another possible response that needs to be discovered and  
it is the one to which I am committed. That response is to initiate a radical 
 reformation within Christianity itself. It begins with the admission that  
traditional Christianity cannot be believed in its current pre-modern forms. It 
 cannot be artificially respirated. It is to face the new possibility that 
these  traditional understandings may never have been correct in the first 
place. It  drives us to what I regard as a freeing distinction between the God 
experience,  that I believe is real, and the human explanations of the God 
experience that  are always time bound, time warped and destined to die. In a similar 
manner it  suggests that there is a difference between the Christ experience 
and the human  explanations of the Christ experience. The Bible is a first 
century human  explanation of a powerful God experience associated with Jesus of 
Nazareth. The  creeds are fourth century attempts in a Greek thinking, 
Mediterranean world to  explain the Christian faith. No explanation is eternal but I 
believe the God  experience is. The secret to the power present in the person 
of Jesus was that  people believed they had experienced God in him. The task 
for the Christian  future is to be open to the reality of the God experience, 
while rejecting as no  longer adequate the explanations of that experience even 
when they are embodied  in the most sacred relics of our faith story. My 
conclusion is that God will  always be a mystery into which we can walk, but the 
truth of God will always be  beyond the ability of human minds to understand, 
to explain or to exhaust.  Christ becomes, therefore, not an idol, but a 
doorway through which our journey  into God can travel. When we understand this, 
then a faith that can be explored,  not a faith that must be believed becomes 
visible. That, I believe, is the hope  for Christianity is in the 21st century. 
That is, therefore, the task to which  my life is committed.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note  from the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores  everywhere and by clicking here!_ 
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060762071/104-6221748-5882304)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Lancer 92112 asks:  
In an interview with _BeliefNet_ 
(http://secure.agoramedia.com/spong/www.beliefnet.com) ), Hans  Küng said that the Vatican knew for decades about sexually 
abusive priests and  the bishops’ mishandling of them. In you opinion, why 
did they allow the  situation to continue for so long?  
Dear Lancer 92112,  
Hans Küng is probably the world’s most quoted theologian of the twentieth  
century. A professor of Catholic Theology at the University of Tübingen, he was  
one of the obvious and clear leaders of the Second Vatican Council that began 
 the Reformation of the Catholic Church under the great Pope John 23rd. He 
was  later removed from the position as Catholic theologian in a purge of 
liberal  thinkers instigated by John Paul II and carried out by Cardinal Joseph  
Ratzinger, who now rules the Vatican as Benedict XVI.  
I have read most of his work. I had him lead a clergy conference for the  
clergy of my diocese shortly after he was purged. I have also attended lectures  
he gave at Union Theological Seminary in New York. We have eaten meals 
together  on three occasions. I tell you these things to let you know of my great  
admiration and deep affection for Hans Küng. I also suggest that he knows much  
about the inner workings of the Roman Catholic Church, so that if he said the  
things attributed to him in the BeliefNet interview, I would be certain they  
were accurate.  
I am quite certain that sexually abusive priests were well known to Catholic  
authorities for years. There was a history of bishops and archbishops moving  
offending clergy to another jurisdiction rather than confronting the issue. 
My  guess is that both the abuse and the cover-up were quite systemic, far more 
 prevalent than has yet been admitted or faced. Perhaps that is the clue to 
their  allowing the abuse to continue. If it was as widespread as we now 
believe, it  must have involved people in high places, including bishops, 
archbishops and  cardinals. A thorough investigation and a complete and honest admission 
might  well have constituted so severe a threat to the life and integrity of 
that noble  institution that they deemed their needs better served by 
dishonesty than  honesty, by cover-up than admission. Of course, in the long run, the 
integrity  of the Church itself is eroded and the exodus of members that 
begins as a  trickle and ends with a flood.  
I do not think Roman Catholic officials have yet understood how many lay  
people were alienated from the Church by this behavior. Nor do I believe that  
thus far there has been anything like a full disclosure, so the issue will not  
end yet. Catholic piety has required the repression of healthy sexuality for  
service in this institution. Unfortunately, when healthy sexuality is 
repressed,  unhealthy sexuality always rises. Repressed sexuality comes back as 
pornography  and child abuse. Perhaps the place where Rome ought to begin is to ask 
why  abstinence is a prerequisite for leadership. I think that is where 
sickness  enters the tradition.  
Thanks for raising the issue.  
John Shelby Spong 



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