[Dialogue] 8/27/09, Spong: The Study of Life, Part 5: Galapagos II: In Darwin's Footsteps

Thu Aug 27 11:46:03 CDT 2009

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Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell
Bishop Spong's next book will be published next week, but you can pre-order now at Amazon.com.

Review:
"Fear of death is the most fundamental fear of human existence. The only way it can be conquered is through knowledge and experience of your eternal being. Eternal Life: A New Vision is elegant invitation to find this part of yourself and be liberated." 
— Deepak Chopra, author of The Third Jesus 

Thursday August 27, 2009 

The Study of Life, Part 5
Galapagos II: My Search for the Meaning of Life as I Walked in Darwin's Footsteps

In the preparation required to write my new book on eternal life, I soon discovered that this subject raised all of the contemporary theological issues that threaten to destroy Christianity as we have known it. It was clear that I would have to turn the traditional religious approach around. I had to read the modern critics for whom the religious concepts of the past make no sense. I also had to come to a new understanding of what life itself means. Life after death cannot possibly be contemplated until one understands the wondrous and even mysterious dimensions of life before death. That study resulted in two immedi
ate insights. First, I discovered the drive to survive deep in every specimen of life from the rainforests to human beings. Second, I found all life to be deeply interrelated and even linked through DNA. Armed with this information I now faced the fact that the work of Charles Darwin had rendered the basic tenets of traditional religion so suspect that if I were to speak of life after death with any credibility I would have to find a new starting place, perhaps outside of or beyond religion itself. I could no longer employ any concept of God that had reigned in religious circles since the birth of religion. Since most people's idea of God is that of an external supernatural being ruling over the world, they would inevitably see the path I would be walking as a move into atheism, something about 180 degrees different from what I was in fact trying to communicate. I would also have to dismiss any concept of life after death based on the behavior controls of eternal reward and punishment, and that is the primary content of most religious ideas of life after death. 
As I embraced these conclusions, I also understood just why Darwinism and traditional religion were such mortal enemies. If Darwin was right, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was wrong on almost every level. In this column I want to look briefly at the content of that struggle. To move beyond it I must understand it. 

The first flash point in the conflict between Darwin and Christianity was centered on the autho
rity of scripture. Evolution did not jibe in any detail with the biblical story of creation. The time line in the Bible was quite different from the time line that Darwin was utilizing. This was so even though Darwin was not yet aware of the actual age of the Earth at 4.7 billion years or the age of life at 3.8 billion years. Second, the Bible attributed the varieties of species to the divine initiative; Darwin to natural selection. Third, the Bible saw human life as a special creation, not related to anything else, while Darwin saw it as evolving out of other forms of life. 

The scripture part of the debate was not as strong in intellectual Christian circles as the traditionalists thought, because a critical study of the Bible had been initiated inside the Church, primarily in Germany, some 50 years prior to Darwin' writings. In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss had published his monumental work, Leben Jesu, which had been translated into English in 1846 under the title The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by George Eliot, the author of Silas Marner and the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. For traditional Christians, Strauss' work was a deeply disturbing book, since it revealed not only the contradictions in the gospel tradition but the very human way in which the gospels had been written. It was clear to Strauss and his colleagues that no angel had guided Matthew's hand in writing his gospel, as the popular art of the day portrayed. Matthew had rather copied about 90% of Mark into his text. In t
he process he had added to, deleted from and even changed some of Mark's ideas. In the non-academic ranks, however, the Bible-based condemnation of Darwin had much longer to run, even after someone suggested that each day in the Genesis creation story "might have been a billion years." 

By 1910, a group of Presbyterian divines centered around Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey decided to mount a counterattack against Darwin in the name of defending "traditional Bible-based Christianity." A series of pamphlets, about 500,000 per printing, were published on a regular basis over a five-year period and distributed to Christian leaders around the world. The pamphlets, financed by the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) in the first known instance of an alliance between the oil industry and right-wing religion, were called "The Fundamentals" and through them, the words "fundamentalist" and "fundamentalism" entered our vocabulary. As a direct result of these pamphlets, all of America's mainline churches began to show a split between their fundamentalist members and those who came to be called "modernists." While the pamphlets polarized the churches, they did little to push back the Darwinian tide. 

The next public battlefield between Darwin and traditional religion took place in the unlikely spot of Clayton, Tennessee, in the year 1925, when a young science teacher named John Scopes was recruited by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge openly a state law in Tennessee forbidding the teaching of anything in the=2
0public schools of Tennessee that was contrary to "the word of God found in the Holy Scriptures." That trial captured the attention of the nation since it was covered by every major newspaper in America, to say nothing of the fledgling and still somewhat static-filled radio industry. John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The fine was never paid. The effect of the trial, however, was once again to bring the insights of Charles Darwin into the awareness of the general public in a massive way. It also served to begin the split in this nation on social issues that was destined to pit the urban Northeast and West coast of America against the heartland of the South and the Midwest, the precursor of the blue states versus the red states of the George W. Bush era. Truth, however, is never really stopped because it is threatening or inconvenient to a previous way of thinking. 

Next, from embattled religious leaders came the "Creation Science Movement," reaching its high-water mark in 1970 when it bought pressure on Washington's Smithsonian Institution to close an exhibition on "The Dynamics of Evolution." Failing that, they wanted a countering exhibition on creation science to be presented so that "truth could be balanced." That too failed, and ultimately the Supreme Court dismissed creation science as unconstitutional under the separation of church and state provision of the constitution. Still not willing to accept defeat, critics of evolution repackaged creation science under the new banner of "Intelligent Design,"20only to have that ploy also dismissed by the courts. Darwinism was clearly here to stay. 

With the literal Bible no longer at the heart of the conflict, it slowly began to dawn on the wider Christian consciousness that a much deeper threat to traditional religion had now been loosed upon them. If Darwin was correct then the basic Christian myth had made assumptions that were no longer true. There was no "perfect creation" from which human life could fall into original sin. If there had been no fall, there was no need for a divine rescue operation carried out by Jesus on the cross. Salvation could no longer mean being restored to a status that human life had never possessed. Instead of being "fallen sinners" we were incomplete human beings. We did not need to be redeemed, we needed to be called and empowered to become more deeply and fully human. Pioneering Christian theologians began to wrestle with these ideas, but whenever these ideas achieved public notice the status quo ecclesiastical authorities attacked them vigorously. In the early years of the 20th century thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead sought to redefine God more as "a process than as a being." A Roman Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, became the first religious figure to seek to reconcile God and evolution in his book The Phenomenon of Man. The Vatican responded by indexing his works. Reformed theologian Paul Tillich, writing in the 1940's and 1950's, built on these ideas by suggesting that there was a "God beyond the Gods
 of men and women" and he began to refer to God not as "a being" but as "the Ground of Being." Next came the "God is Dead" theologians in the 1960's as the supernatural, theistic concept of God became less and less believable. They were followed by the work of two Anglican bishops, John A. T. Robinson in Great Britain and James A. Pike in America. For their efforts both were marginalized and finally squeezed out by their respective churches. The external, supernatural and invasive God, however, was seen to be in inevitable collapse. 

We live today in the midst of this transition. Those who cannot see the problem and who seem to think that all one has to do is to recite the old formulas loudly and they will be believable have become the fundamentalists. They come in both a Catholic and a Protestant form. Those who do see the problem are now convinced that religion is dying or has already died. They become the secularists who get on with the task of living creatively in a godless world. Most of them have been drawn from the "main line" churches, which are all in a statistical freefall. 

Darwin removed God from the day-to-day workings of our world. He redefined human life biologically as one species of the animal kingdom, finite creatures destined for a fate no different from the sheep of New Zealand or the iguanas of the Galapagos. If that proved to be an accurate definition then traditional religion with its theistic concept of God could not survive. No artificial respiration will re
suscitate a concept that is not in touch with established knowledge. Either we have reached the end of religion as a human enterprise or we have to find a new way to approach both human life and whatever we mean by transcendence. A record-keeping theistic deity, who metes out reward and punishment in order to control behavior, is simply no longer viable. This is not an insignificant crisis. No, I am not prepared to reject Christianity, but I am prepared to rethink its meaning in a radical way, so radical that traditional Christians may feel that all that they once believed was holy is now being taken away from them. 

To analyze the possibilities for a new Christianity designed to live without apology in this new world will be my task in the column next week. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Hans Jørgen Danielsen from Norway writes:

With great enthusiasm I've just finished your book Jesus for the Non-Religious. Among your other writings, your continuous search and consistent campaign in this book for a new reformation within the Christian Church is truly among the deepest and most honest I have come across!
You touch a string deep within me. For years I have questioned the path Christianity has taken — a path that leads nowhere. While "everybody" sees it, they keep these things to themselves, not daring to speak up. The clergy look elsewhere — towards scripture and the "immortal" dogmas. They flee a situ
ation because they don't want to get involved in it. Instead their stubborn attitude just reinforces a situation that gives no answers to the ever-increasing gap between knowledge and religious dogmas. 

We see signs of Christian fundamentalism in certain circles in the United States, where a movement presented by Philip Johnson has launched the "wedge of truth" strategy, a wedge that is supposed to be forced through all new discoveries in evolution or in astronomy. This wedge is supposed to break up our acceptance to new findings by pointing to the ever-important Bible. This is no less than religious despotism! By cutting out humanity's quest for knowledge, we cut out what it means to be human beings. Evolution will never end. Humankind will develop further into something we don't see today. And we shall all disappear someday — either self-conflicted or through earthly conditions being too harsh on us.

Christian dogmas have historically limited the human quest. No better can we witness this by studying the enlightenment that followed the middle ages. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — they all went forward against the oppression from the Church, facing grave consequences. For Kepler this meant he had to abandon his astronomical studies, having been ordered to return to the university in Tübingen to lecture on mathematics. This was for him, being a very religious man, the biggest disappointment of his life. 

The Church turned its back on this new science while it had a golden opportunity to fathom the20new human quests and accept new knowledge as a way to widen our perspective towards new insight. To open up for another and much wider concept of God. A God beyond our wildest imagination — a Ground of all Being, as you say. 

The Church should endeavor to create humility and open our eyes towards a new understanding. While closing in on the universe, our minds should be adjusted to accept our real place in cosmos — to let us grasp the unbelievable greatness while seeing that life on this tiny speck of a planet has a meaning after all. Comprehension — Gnosis — is mankind's real task, its function in life. By that we become co-workers in the natural revelation. This open involvement will have great influence on personal morale.

And now to the big question: How do we get the clergy to open up to these new perspectives? How will they react to such heretical thoughts? What revolution must Christianity go through to grasp fully our real purpose as humans? All I can say is: I believe it will be a tough fight! Don't you ever quit your important work!

Hans Jørgen Danielsen from Norway writes:

With great enthusiasm I've just finished your book Jesus for the Non-Religious. Among your other writings, your continuous search and consistent campaign in this book for a new reformation within the Christian Church is truly among the deepest and most honest I have come across!
You touch a string deep within me. For years I have questioned the path Christianity has 
taken — a path that leads nowhere. While "everybody" sees it, they keep these things to themselves, not daring to speak up. The clergy look elsewhere — towards scripture and the "immortal" dogmas. They flee a situation because they don't want to get involved in it. Instead their stubborn attitude just reinforces a situation that gives no answers to the ever-increasing gap between knowledge and religious dogmas. 

We see signs of Christian fundamentalism in certain circles in the United States, where a movement presented by Philip Johnson has launched the "wedge of truth" strategy, a wedge that is supposed to be forced through all new discoveries in evolution or in astronomy. This wedge is supposed to break up our acceptance to new findings by pointing to the ever-important Bible. This is no less than religious despotism! By cutting out humanity's quest for knowledge, we cut out what it means to be human beings. Evolution will never end. Humankind will develop further into something we don't see today. And we shall all disappear someday — either self-conflicted or through earthly conditions being too harsh on us.

Christian dogmas have historically limited the human quest. No better can we witness this by studying the enlightenment that followed the middle ages. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — they all went forward against the oppression from the Church, facing grave consequences. For Kepler this meant he had to abandon his astronomical studies, having been ordered to return to the university in T
übingen to lecture on mathematics. This was for him, being a very religious man, the biggest disappointment of his life. 

The Church turned its back on this new science while it had a golden opportunity to fathom the new human quests and accept new knowledge as a way to widen our perspective towards new insight. To open up for another and much wider concept of God. A God beyond our wildest imagination — a Ground of all Being, as you say. 

The Church should endeavor to create humility and open our eyes towards a new understanding. While closing in on the universe, our minds should be adjusted to accept our real place in cosmos — to let us grasp the unbelievable greatness while seeing that life on this tiny speck of a planet has a meaning after all. Comprehension — Gnosis — is mankind's real task, its function in life. By that we become co-workers in the natural revelation. This open involvement will have great influence on personal morale.

And now to the big question: How do we get the clergy to open up to these new perspectives? How will they react to such heretical thoughts? What revolution must Christianity go through to grasp fully our real purpose as humans? All I can say is: I believe it will be a tough fight! Don't you ever quit your important work!

Dear Hans,

Thank you for your letter and your enthusiasm for my work. I was recently in Stockholm addressing a conference on "Rethinking the Christian Faith" attended by peopl
e from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Poland. I mention this so that you will know that you are not alone and that there are some in the church who wrestle with the things that you describe. Among the senior leaders at this conference were two Norwegian pastors, both from Oslo, Grete Haugen and Helge Hognestad. You might want to be in touch with them. Both are wonderful people.

We need to understand the role organized religion plays in the lives of most people. It is part of the human security system. Most people seek security, not truth, in their religious pilgrimage. The trouble with security is that it never lasts. In the words of the poet James Russell Lowell, "Time makes ancient good uncouth." Yet we continue to make idols out of yesterday's consensus. This is true in science, as Niels Bohr discovered when Albert Einstein could not embrace quantum weirdness. It is true in politics and was quite visible when both the Roosevelt revolution on the left and the Reagan revolution on the right disturbed the status quo. It is also true in religion when we constantly define religious truth as unchanging, infallible, inerrant or external. It is the nature of self-conscious human life to be insecure. Religion, when it seeks security or peace of mind, is actually violating our humanity. So religion and religious leaders will always be conservative, resistant to change and highly critical of those who have new insights or who walk to the beat of a different drummer.

There will, however, also always b
e those in the church who see a bit further. They will be an uncomfortable presence. People will call them heretics and their thought revolutionary, but if it is true it cannot be denied. The history of the Church reveals that yesterday's heresy is tomorrow's orthodoxy. The Vatican admitted in 1991 that Galileo was right. The Church is still making peace with Darwin and Freud. We have not yet begun to wrestle with Einstein and Hawking, but we will.

In such a church I believe people like you have a great role to play. You need to challenge regularly the idea that truth can ever be captured in a Bible, a creed, a doctrine or a dogma. You need to support those people in the Church who press the edges, create the controversy and think outside the traditional boxes. Above all, you must never abandon this institution to the small minds that content themselves with the task of preserving the dated truth of yesterday as if God could ever be captured in human words.

Such a vocation will not win you popularity, but about 25 years after you have died, appreciation for you will begin to grow. If you have any doubts about the truth of which I speak ask Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, John A. T. Robinson or even Jesus of Nazareth.

I hope our paths cross some day.

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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