[Dialogue] Spong 8/21 Questions and Answers
KroegerD at aol.com
KroegerD at aol.com
Thu Aug 21 14:56:16 EDT 2008
August 21, 2008
Dear Friends,
Three or four times a year I devote my whole column to responding to the
questions of the readers of this column or to those from people who have
attended my lectures in some part of the world. Today will be one of those columns.
This gives me the opportunity to dig into my question file more deeply than I
am ever able to do on the one question each week format that I normally use.
I have a present backlog of over 5000 questions. I do not want that number
to discourage you from sending your letters and questions regularly. You may
be sure that I read every one of them, even if I cannot respond personally
except through this column. Many times the questions are quite similar so I try
to pick the best articulated one and hope that all of the others feel that
they have been heard as well. Sometimes the questions are time sensitive and
before I can get to them the issue has faded from the public mind. Sometimes
the question has been previously addressed and I do not feel I can be
repetitive until some time has passed or until I have something new to say on the
subject. I do want you to know, however, that your questions and comments are
always welcomed and appreciated.
I will also include in this column some of your letters about my column of
August 6 in regard to who is welcome to receive communion in the church. The
mail was large on that column and I thought many of you would like to see some
of it. If you would like to review the column or to read it for the first
time, subscribers have access to the _entire library_
(http://secure.agoramedia.com/story_home_spong.asp) of what I have published over the years in this
weekly e-mail. Enjoy the "dog-days" of summer, unless you live in the Southern
Hemisphere, in which case enjoy the last days of winter.
John Shelby Spong
Questions and Answers
Susan from St. Paul, Minnesota, writes:
I find it difficult, very difficult, to participate in the life of the
Church because of its negativity and distance from contemporary scientific
knowledge. What can I do? Where can I go? Is there any hope for a revolution within
the Church?
Dear Susan,
The Church is a complex organism. Many seek in it security from all
questioning. A few seek to move beyond its understanding into the world of the 21st
century. The tension between the two groups is palpable. Recall that Galileo
was condemned and forced to recant from his idea that the earth rotated around
the sun and therefore was not the center of a three-tiered universe. Both
Galileo and the Pope were members of the Christian Church. The Pope was seeking
religious security; Galileo was seeking truth.
The same could be said for Isaac Newton, whose work made both miracle and
magic unbelievable. Newton covered his vulnerability by stating that there were
two books that revealed the Truth of God. One was the Bible. This, Newton
stated, was the book the church and the theologians were meant to interpret and
to determine what it says and what it means. The other book, said Newton, was
the "Book of Nature," which, he stated, was the domain for the scientists to
explore and to interpret. Thus their truths did not overlap. Newton got away
with that simplistic distinction, but only because most people did not know
much about either book. If one treats the Bible literally, it does proclaim a
three-tiered universe, a seven day creation, God's ability to stop the sun
in the sky to provide Joshua with more daylight, and the ability for a virgin
to conceive and for a deceased person to be called back to life. None of
these things is possible in the world we inhabit today.
When the Bible and empirical or scientific truth are in conflict, I think we
need to recognize that the Bible is probably the one that is wrong. That is
not a problem unless you think that God wrote the Bible, because that would
mean that God had to be wrong. The gods of human beings are frequently wrong,
just as they are frequently inadequate and frequently evil. Why is it that we
do not recognize that no human being and no religious system can finally
capture the truth of God?
The Bible was written between 2000 and 3000 years ago. Do you know anyone who
would think that absolute truth has been captured in a 2000- to
3000-year-old textbook on any subject? Would you go to a doctor who practiced medicine
out of a 2000- to 3000-year-old medical textbook? Would you study astronomy,
geography, chemistry or biology out of a book that old? Religious claims for
the literal accuracy of the Bible are nothing more than the conclusions of
frightened people who cannot deal with the world of today and so they hide in
irrational conclusions.
There have always been voices in the Church that force the Christian faith to
face reality. I hope you might be willing to become one of them.
John Shelby Spong
____________________________________
Irene Frantz of Tewksbury, New Jersey, writes:
My goddaughter and my father died last year. I do not believe they went to
"a better place" and I do not believe I will ever see them again. I think this
life may be it. Do you envision some sort of life after death?
Dear Irene,
The question you raise is of a universal concern. I have been working on
life after death intensively for the past three years in preparation for what I
anticipate will be the final book of my career. It is hard to talk about this
subject because our minds have been shaped by the religious images of the
ages. For example, the way you frame the question is so deeply shaped by past
religious thought that I find it hard to respond to it. The phrase "a better
place" is used primarily by religious people as a pastoral tool and by
visionaries to blunt both the pain of death and the pain of life on this earth. We
need to embrace the fact that as wonderful as this life is for some of us, it
has probably been sheer misery for the vast majority of the world's people
since the dawn of self-consciousness. Trying to cope with the pain and
hopelessness, to say nothing of the tragic dimensions of life, is a daily task for so
many.
I deeply believe in God though I find it difficult to put that belief into
words. I am quite sure neither I nor anyone can tell another who God is or what
God is. We are all people who are bound by both time and space and yet when
we speak of God we are trying to describe that which, if real, is not bound
by time and space. I reject totally all ideas of heaven and hell that are
related to concepts of reward and punishment. I think they are immature
expression of a childlike, parent religion that seeks to use the power of fear and
guilt to control behavior. There must be a better reason than that to live with
love and caring. Indeed I have reached the place in life where, if I were
convinced that this life is "all there is," to use your phrase, I do not think
that would cause me to live in any way different from the way I now live. We
live out who we are. Our task, and the ultimate religious task, is to become
who we are. One does not do that in response to fear.
I hope to complete this book soon. It is scheduled for a fall of 2009
publication. The barriers to be overcome before I can address the subject are
awesome. It cannot be done in this brief question and answer. The book will
consume about 200 pages.
So all I can say now is that I have convictions I cannot explain, faith I
cannot defend, but nonetheless I am a believer. Perhaps Richard Dawkins is
correct and I am delusional, but I don't think so. The book will give my readers
a chance to determine their assessment of Dawkins' charge. I shall look
forward to that public debate.
John Shelby Spong
____________________________________
Steven Haynes from Woodland, California, writes:
I have followed your journey and read your books over the years. You have
been an inspiration to me in my own personal spiritual journey to come back
into the Christian fold with new interpretations of the old symbols. Thank you
for your courage. In your most recent books you have mentioned the theme of
interpreting Christianity in a non-theistic context. I find this idea
fascinating, but I have always been taught to pray to some personage as God. For
instance, it's common to open prayers with "Heavenly Father" and interact with
this God in a similar manner as one would talk to another person. But if we
assume a non-theistic view of the world and take this "Heavenly personage" away,
I find myself confused when I pray. I find myself reverting back to the old
"Heavenly Father" even though I want to pray with a wider vision. What are
your thoughts on the role of prayer in a non-theistic Christianity?
Dear Steven,
The religious thought forms of the past are deeply personal and
personalistic. God is perceived as a being not unlike us but without our limitations.
This is an almost irreversible problem in theology. Because the highest thing
that we can imagine is human personhood, we will inevitably conceive of God in
those terms. As the Greek philosopher Xenophanes once wrote, "If horses had
gods they would look like horses!" So the gods of human beings will look like
human beings. We cannot escape that.
Idolatry takes over, however, when we fail to realize that God is different
from our human definitions of God. We pretend that these words are not just a
human perception of the divine, but what God actually is. We have literalized
our own creations. That is the essence of idolatry. The human mind can
experience God but the human mind can never define the power being experienced.
Prayer is where this false identification becomes painfully obvious. Most of
our prayers beseech a "Being" to do something for us — heal us, protect us,
comfort us, be with us, etc. — that we fear we cannot do for ourselves. These
are natural human yearnings. There is nothing wrong with admitting these
yearnings so long as we recognize them for what they are. The prayers of most
human beings sound like adult letters to Santa Claus to me. Getting beyond this
in our prayer life is an essential part of spiritual maturity. It means
asking questions like: Can God work outside the human? Can God control the
disasters of hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis? Does God protect people in time of war
from bombing, killing, maiming? Can God heal sicknesses, reverse our
diseases and restore us to health?
If one answers those questions with a yes then one has to explain why God
doesn't do what we believe God has the power to do. If we answer these questions
with a no, we have reduced God to impotence and the shelf life of an
impotent deity is not very long.
Communing with the divine, being open to the presence of the divine, allowing
the divine to work through the human is another way to talk about prayer and
it is here that we must begin to engage that process. I expect we will
always use personal images when we talk about God or prayer. I am also convinced
that this is not the pathway into meaning.
I hope this at least starts the conversations within you.
John Shelby Spong
Here is a sample of letters received about the column of August 6, 2008. –
JSS
Kay Jackson, via the Internet, writes:
Thank you so much for your article about God's table and the celebration of
communion. I, too, had tears in my eyes as you told of your grandson giving
his mother her first taste of communion in years. To me, that was truly co
mmunion in action. Truly we humans are good at taking something intended to bring
us closer to each other (and so further into God) and turn it into something
institutional and rule-bound. It's kind of comical. I can't help thinking
about Jesus' reminder that the Sabbath was created for us, not the other way
around.
I was raised Roman Catholic, and as a child accepted without question that I
had to be of a certain age, have certain schooling, etc., before I could be
allowed to take communion. It was pretty neat back then to finally get through
all the preliminaries, be dressed up like a wedding cake, and finally taste
that little wafer (that, in fact, was about the extent of any meaning for
me). Only later did it dawn on me that some people were excluded — my mother,
for instance, who had been raised Presbyterian and had signed an agreement at
her marriage that we kids would be raised Catholic.
I remember rejecting this exclusionary-ness at a very young age, though I
never spoke to anyone about it. I never felt any qualm about taking communion at
friends' churches through the years, and did so whenever invited. It seemed
natural. When two of my best friends had a commitment ceremony in celebration
of their relationship, the spiritual part of the service included communion
open to whoever would like to participate. In this particular instance,
probably because of the occasion and what it signified for these very dear friends
(and the sight of their dogs leading the procession), it was the most
meaningful communion I'd ever taken part in. I was only sorry my husband didn't
participate. Not because of any religious constraints, but because he is one of
the so many folks for whom religion and its symbols holds no meaning (as you
mention in your essay).
Recently, when my dear father died, we afforded for him all the comforts the
Catholic Church has to offer, including a Requiem Mass. It hit me like a
physical blow when the priest said, "all who are Catholic may come up for
communion — those who aren't may keep their seats or come up for a blessing." I
knew he was a particularly conservative priest, I'd heard him say this before at
all the many masses I'd attended with my father, and yet it seemed so wrong
to exclude anyone who wanted to partake of what should simply be a gift.
Especially at my father's funeral.
I hope you're finding that people are responding to your vision of a new
Christianity. I've been so uncomfortable with the Catholic religious tradition
that I finally had to begin looking in other directions. I am, after all, a
midwife who advocates for women's rights to govern their reproductive lives in
whatever way is healthy for them. Don't think I could discuss THAT with Dad's
priest. Thankfully, I'm learning there are larger tables than the Catholic
one, and at the moment I am getting my inspiration from your work and that of
Fr. Richard Rohr.
____________________________________
Jim McFall, via the Internet, writes:
Some Catholics understand that it is God's table. Just a short story for
your file: Our son married a girl brought up in the Roman Catholic faith. They
had a full mass wedding. Our son agreed to take the prior wedding training,
but stated he was not joining the Catholic Church. Prior to the wedding he saw
the order of the service and it included him and his new bride serving the
Eucharist. He approached the old Irish priest and reminded him that he was not
joining the church and did not want there to be any embarrassment for anyone.
The priest placed his hand on our son's should and said. "Son, don't you
worry about that. You and me are serving the biscuits, the rest is between them
and God."
____________________________________
The Reverend Diane E. Morgan, via the Internet, writes:
I am retired director of spiritual care of a very large hospital (over 1,000
beds) that also has a Clinical Pastoral Education program. One summer, two C
PE students from the local Roman Catholic seminary took exception to the fact
that chaplains would distribute hosts consecrated by our Roman Catholic
chaplain priests to non-Roman Catholics who requested communion.
I couldn't believe their concern. "Do you really think Jesus would ask them
if they were card-carrying Roman Catholics before he would come to them?" I
asked. This infuriated them.
To make a long story short, the situation came under the scrutiny of the
Cardinal of the Diocese, who made the following demands: 1. Hosts consecrated by
Roman Catholic priests could be given only to Roman Catholics; and 2.
Non-Roman Catholic chaplains could not give a Roman Catholic host to a Roman
Catholic patient. The chaplain would have to get a Roman Catholic doctor or nurse to
give the host.
To make sure we had enough students for the CPE program, we acquiesced to the
demands. From then on we kept two sets of hosts in our ombrey, sadly
referred to as the Catholic Jesus and the non-Catholic Jesus (hosts consecrated by
me, an Episcopal priest). Roman Catholic Eucharistic Ministers were always
careful to be sure they took the "real" Jesus.
I was never sure if the problem was the hosts or the fact that I was the
ordained female head of the department!
____________________________________
The Rev. Bindy Wright Snyder, from Memphis, writes:
As a priest whose grown children (cradle Episcopalians) rarely come to
church, I loved the article. There's hope.
____________________________________
David Cantwell, a Roman Catholic layman from Brisbane, writes:
I have just read the latest e-mail article and found my eyes welling up when
I got to the end. It was truly touching. Well done.
One thing that does excite me about the Anglican Church is the welcome to
receive communion whenever I attend and Anglican Eucharist. It is always an
embarrassment that my Catholic Church does not reciprocate.
____________________________________
Robert Daily, via the Internet, writes:
Masterful treatment — and I relish the inclusion of your grandchildren in
your church attendance, for I also have done it. New Book Now Available!
_JESUS FOR THE NON RELIGIOUS_
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060778415/103-4050528-4406232)
"The Pope," says the publisher about this new edition, "describes the
ancient traditional Jesus. John Shelby Spong brings us a Jesus by whom modern
people can be inspired." Newly published in paperback, Jesus for the Non-Religious
is now available in Bishop Spong's online store.
_Order your copy now!_
(http://astore.amazon.com/bishopspong-20/detail/0060778415/103-4050528-4406232)
____________________________________
**************It's only a deal if it's where you want to go. Find your travel
deal here.
(http://information.travel.aol.com/deals?ncid=aoltrv00050000000047)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20080821/bf3c5168/attachment-0001.html
More information about the Dialogue
mailing list