[Dialogue] 2/16/12, Spong: "Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part IV: ExpandingtheBankruptcy of Theism

Thu Feb 16 13:02:38 EST 2012

So, Darrell - always a delight to hear your voice. You da Man (or as I heard
today, "you da Dude"). 

Loved the third grade analogy - those are where I can relate - thanks! It's
been a long time since Bartlesville. Did I hear you are in AZ now? Would
love to connect.

Sunny

Sunny Walker

SunWalker Enterprises

303-587-3017 (cell)

303-671-0704 (home/office)

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Aurora, Colorado

No matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back. ~ Turkish
Proverb

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From: dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of darrell walker
Sent: Thursday, February 16, 2012 10:52 AM
To: Colleague Dialogue
Cc: Bob Boyte; Harold Pratt; Barbara Boyte
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] 2/16/12,Spong: "Think Different - Accept
Uncertainty" Part IV: ExpandingtheBankruptcy of Theism

My thoughts in reponse to my friend, Roger Alexander, who gave a positive
response to Spong's essay.  Darrell

Two thoughts, Roger.

    1.  We do not know the workings of God.  Specifically, Spong (along with
many others) implies strongly that the Holocaust could not have been of God,
and if it was, it would place God in the corner with Evil.  It is possible
(I consider likely) that the Holocaust did have God's blessing in that it
provided oportunities for innumerable people to grow spiritually through the
experience.  Pain and suffering are minor inconveniences on the path of
spiritual growth and more often than not, contribute to spiritual growth.
There have been many writings evolving from the Holocaust that give
testamony to that happening.  We do not know the ways of God.  Nice, sweet,
cushy lives usually do not enhance spiritual growth.  Pain often does.  One
reading of God's intent is that the first priority for human lives is
spiritual growth, not the absence of pain.  Pain is a catalyst for spiritual
growth.  A lot of spiritual growth occurred during the Holocaust, not only
with those suffering through the concentration camps, but the millions who
afterward have paused to reflect on the causes leading to suffering.  I
fault Spong for his limited view of the workings of God.

    2.  Spong routinely puts down the theology of the Mythic level of
spiritual evolvement.  It shows his limited knowledge of how spiritual
evolvement works.  The Mythic level, with its story and concept of
sin/forgiveness, is a necessary step in the process of spiritual evolution.
We do not put down the teachings of the third grade in school becuase it
does not include calculus and cardiovascular surgical methodology.  Spong
routinely dinigrates the theology of a necessary level, egotistically
implying that he has reached the ultimate and that everyone should immulate
his theology.  Granted, RS-1 provided many people, including you and I, a
path out of the Mythic level into the higher levels of spiritual attainment.
I am eternally blessed by your recruiting me to the course.  But even RS-1
and EI/ICA are not the ultimate.  I personally have, through no small amount
of deep reflection, grown beyond RS-1 theology.  It is a long process in
which each step is blessed by the Divine Ground of Being, not to be
dinigrated.

    Darrell 

Roger Alexander commented:

    This is an excellent essay. I still marvel at how far ahead of the
"institutional church" the theology in RS1 was and still is.

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"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part IV: Expanding the Bankruptcy of
Theism

Before proceeding with this series, I want to return to my theme of last
week and examine the concept of theism more closely.  In so doing, I run the
risk of repetition, but so crucial is this idea in the development of this
series that I am willing to do that in order to make sure that the ground
has been laid for a deeper and more significant examination of why the
predominant theistic definition of God is mortally wounded and how we must
find a way to transcend its limits, while holding open the possibility that
the God beyond theism can still be perceived as real.

It was a German theologian named Paul Tillich who first opened for me the
possibility that God was not a being, supernatural in power, dwelling
somewhere beyond the sky and ready to come to us with intervening miraculous
power.  To say it differently, Tillich was the thinker who first made me
realize that "theism" was no longer a definition of God with which I could
live.  That insight was expanded by reading a book entitled Night, by Elie
Wiesel.  Wiesel, a teenage Jewish boy, sent by the Nazi regime to the death
camps of Adolf Hitler, was parted from his mother at the prison entrance,
when Elie and his father were sent in one direction, while his mother and
all other women were sent in another.  He would never see her again.
Somehow Wiesel was destined to survive that horror.  Shortly before that
war's conclusion, he watched his father die. Even the presence of the light
at the end of the tunnel was not enough to overcome what his father's body
had suffered.  Elie Wiesel was thus the sole survivor in his family, but
that survival left him a changed man.  For Wiesel hope had died, faith in
God had died and meaning was in tatters.  In the sacred scriptures of his
people he had read the story of Moses and the Exodus.  His Bible asserted
that in the past God had come to the aid of God's people.  God had pounded
the Egyptians with multiple plagues until they agreed to set the Jewish
people free from their bondage.  God had aided their escape, these
scriptures proclaimed, by splitting the waters of the Red Sea, so that the
Jews could pass through on dry land while the Egyptians all drowned.  In the
wilderness God had fed these people with bread from heaven, and had brought
water for them out of the rock at Meribah.  This was a God who saw, who
intervened with supernatural power, a God who cared.  That was, however, not
the Holocaust experience so Wiesel asked: "Where was this God now? Had God
abandoned God's people?  Was it possible that God had died?  Was his God
nothing but a figment of his imagination?"  His spiritual crisis was real.

In Wiesel's mind the equation was simple.  If God was real and had the power
to intervene to stop the Holocaust, but had declined to do so, then God was
both responsible and morally culpable. Such a God would be a malevolent
demon, not an object of worship.  If God did not have the power to intervene
then God must be impotent.  Having a malevolent God or an impotent God is
worse than having no God at all.  That was the dilemma that the concept of a
theistic deity raised for Wiesel and indeed for everyone else.  That is why
the human mind has over the centuries felt compelled to justify the ways of
God to human minds.  The traditional idea of an intervening God equipped
with supernatural power collided head on with the idea of God's goodness.
You could not have both.  The claims we made for God paled before the
enormity of the evil inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis.  The inevitable
conclusions were clear.  Either there was no God or the definition we had of
God was woefully inadequate.  Wiesel was plunged into the dark night of the
soul, and so were many citizens of the Western World.

The theistic understanding of God had been badly weakened earlier by the
expansion of human knowledge.  By the time of the Nazi horror in the first
half of the twentieth century, we were well past the writings of Copernicus,
Kepler and Galileo, 16th and 17th century figures, who had in effect
rendered homeless the theistic God.  The idea that the skies were empty and
the universe was infinite was the conclusion toward which these early
astronomers were headed.  The suggestion that there was an all-seeing deity
who kept us as the apple of the divine eye or a deity who numbered the hairs
of our heads, or even a God "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires
known and from whom no secrets are hid" became quite problematic. The
Christian Church tried to fight back against this heavenly emptiness by
putting Galileo on trial and convicting him of heresy.  Because of his age
and infirmity, however and perhaps also aided by the fact that he had a
daughter who was a nun, he was not burned at the stake.  Instead he agreed
to recant publicly and never again to publish any thoughts contrary to the
church's faith.  He was sentenced to live under house arrest for the balance
of his days.  The church in that era, so drunk with its own power, believed
that if someone disagreed with the church's version of the truth they had to
be wrong.  That had been the working principle behind the Inquisition. New
ideas, they had to learn, cannot be repressed simply because they are
inconvenient to established truth.  In 1991 the Vatican officially announced
that they now believed that Galileo was correct.  This was decades past the
beginning of space travel.  Galileo was right indeed and the theistic
understanding of God that Galileo challenged began its slow but inevitable
decline.

It did not get better for the theistic deity with the work of Isaac Newton
in the latter half of the 17thy century.  It appeared to Newton and his
followers that the universe operated with immutable, natural laws.  A
capricious deity could not set these laws aside to answer prayers, to send
rain, to turn the direction of a hurricane, to stop an earthquake, to cure a
sickness, to end a war, or even to counter human atrocities. The religious
voices, fettered to a theistic past, found their explanations sounding more
like comic relief than serious conviction.  All of the things we once
assumed to be the actions of the theistic deity were now explained without
appeal to that deity at all.  Increasingly the world had no need for the
theistic God hypothesis.  The theistic God had thus become virtually
unemployed.  The theistic deity was given a pink slip and retired.

Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed this God to be dead as long ago as the 19th
century.  In the1960's the "God is Dead" theologians, a group of leading
Christian academics, added their voices to the despairing state of
theological understanding. We are today increasingly living in a
post-Christian world and more and more people become convinced almost daily
that they can no longer sing the theistic God's song in the 21st century
that all of us now inhabit.  If people can not accept this exploding
knowledge that has served to call all theistic presuppositions into
question, they become defensive and hide behind the irrational and easily
dismissed authority claims like being the possessors of either an infallible
Pope or an inerrant Bible.  If people do embrace the world of new knowledge,
they find no room in their lives for the theistic God ideas of the past.
They are today leaving the unthinking religious institutions in droves,
abandoning the faith of their fathers and mothers to the dustbins of
history.

It was into that world that Paul Tillich began to seek a new definition of
God.  Perhaps God is not a being.  Perhaps we have created the theistic God
in our image, not the other way around.  Perhaps we can discover a
transcendent dimension in life by looking at being itself.  Perhaps it is
life that is holy, flowing as it does through every living creature, as it
has journeyed from single cells, which first defined life about 3.8 billion
years ago, to the self-conscious complexity that human beings now
illustrate.  Among these self-conscious ones there has always been a
yearning to transcend all limits, to engage the meaning of life, to probe
the potential of love and to seek oneness with something that is beyond our
grasp.  Is this 'God' not still present hiding behind the theistic
categories that are now dying? Can we not let theism die without destroying
the human yearning for the divine?  It is only the death of theism not the
death of God that fuels our current religious despair.  Suppose, however,
that we look again and see that there is something beyond our separateness
that calls us into oneness, that there is something beyond our
self-consciousness that invites us into a universal consciousness, and that
there is something beyond our limits that encourages us to step beyond all
human limitations. Can we not then begin to define this God
non-theistically?  Instead of searching for God as a being who dwells beyond
the sky, Tillich suggested that we turn inward and search for the God who is
the Ground of being, the Source of life and the Source of love.  Is my life
then part of the life that is God?  Is my love a manifestation of a love
that emanates from God?  Is my being related to and grounded in the being of
God? Is our mystical yearning a delusion or a pointer toward a new reality?

A new door is surely opening for our exploration.  We tremble at the door.
If we dare to walk through it, we must leave behind almost all of the
religious symbols by which we have been nurtured in the past.  We will, we
fear, become "secular humanists."  If on the other hand, we refuse to walk
through that door, we must spend our time defending our dying religious past
with increasing hysteria.  We become fundamentalists, traditionalists or
pre-Vatican II Catholics.

If the only alternative to theism is atheism, that will be the result.  I
propose something quite different.  My expectations are that we will find a
new understanding of what it means to be human and in that process discover
a mystical oneness that can and will relate us to that which is eternal.  It
is that goal which beckons me to begin this journey that will inevitably
take us out of the immaturity of our religious past and into the wonder of
our religious future.

In that journey inevitably creeds will change, old institutional forms will
die and new ones will be born, and all present liturgies will be
transformed, but the eternal search for God will go on.  That is the
challenge facing Christianity today.  I am willing to begin the journey now.
I hope I am not alone.

~John Shelby Spong

Read the essay online
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Question & Answer

Stephanie, via the Internet, writes:

Question:

I have been reading your weekly newsletters with great interest; thank you
for articulating faith for the 21st century so clearly.  I have to admit,
though, that I'm somewhat perplexed about your series on "The Meaning of the
Resurrection."  I understand that you seek to place Peter at the center of a
"resurrection awareness" that took some 6-12 months after the crucifixion.
You quote several references as well as Paul's, "appeared to Cephas and the
Twelve" as firm support.  What I am wondering is - since the gospels are
subversive to predominant culture, why downplay all four gospels' claims
that Mary Magdalene, either alone or together with other women, was the
first at an empty grave and became messenger of the news that opened the
door to a resurrection awareness for herself and others?  Yes, I understand
that in Jewish Culture, women's testimony couldn't be trusted unless
affirmed by a man, but so many stories in the gospels undermine predominant
culture especially as it pertains to gender roles that I always thought was
God's last and best joke to give the message of the empty grave to women.
So where is Mary Magdalene, or any of the other women, in this resurrection
awareness?  As an aside, you should know that, 25 years ago when I was in
seminary in Austin, your brother was one of my most influential teachers.  I
remember him fondly. I'm glad you continue to clarify and articulate faith
for this time and age.  Thank you for your ministry.

Answer:

Dear Stephanie, 

I share your sense of distress, but all of my studies led me to suggest that
the tomb stories in which the women play major roles are of secondary not
primary value.  If you go back to the "where" question in the series to
which you refer (which incidentally ran a long time ago), the data reveals
the primacy of Galilee over Jerusalem in the Easter narratives.  The Galilee
stories are far more primitive and un-doctored than the Jerusalem stories.
Only in Jerusalem do you have sightings of Jesus, conversations with the
Risen Christ and even, as the stories develop, increasing physicality. 

In Mark, the earliest gospel, the women led by Magdalene come to the tomb,
but see nothing except a messenger who directs them to tell the disciples
that Jesus will meet them in Galilee.  They flee in fear and say nothing to
anyone.  Matthew changes Mark that he is copying and has the women see the
Risen Christ in the garden at dawn.  Luke, also with Mark in front of him,
is true to Mark's story line saying that the women do not see Jesus.  John
makes Magdalene the star of his resurrection drama, but John is writing near
the end of the first century. Even in John, Magdalene does not see Jesus
until her second peering into the tomb. 

The better case for the role of women in the gospel tradition can be made
not from the resurrection narratives, but from the body of the gospels.
Mark, Matthew and Luke all assert that Jesus had female disciples who
followed him "all the way from Galilee."  Paul declares that in Christ there
is neither male nor female.  Jesus is portrayed as allowing the touch of a
woman with a chronic menstrual discharge; as standing between the woman
taken in adultery and her accusers, and supports Mary's right to sit at the
feet of the Teacher as a faithful pupil, capable of learning.  John makes
two women, the Samaritan woman by the well and Magdalene, the heralds of his
"word."  I want to celebrate women in the biblical story and in the life of
the church itself, but I do not think I can ground that in the resurrection
narratives. 

Thank you for your words about my brother.  I miss him terribly. 

~John Shelby Spong

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