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

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

Thanks, Dick
 
But I think it will take another 1,000 years or more for the  fundamentalists 
and conservative Catholics to change.
 
Meantime global warming will doom us while the these folks (and all fundies  
of all faiths)  bow before  reduced images and ancient  prejudices.
 
Cynthia
 
 
In a message dated 9/13/2007 6:34:45 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
KroegerD at aol.com writes:

 
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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