[Dialogue] 3/01/12, Spong: "Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part V: The Traditional Religious Definition of Human Life

[Ellie Stock]

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"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part V: The Traditional Religious Definition of Human Life
In this series we have looked at the changing understanding of God throughout human history. We have tried to separate the God experience of transcendence, wonder and awe from the God explanation that has ranged from animism to fertility cults and mother worship to a God understood after the analogy of a tribal chief and currently to a kind of monotheistic oneness that has become all but universal, yet is still conceived in widely different ways across the great religious systems of the world. Despite all the claims made by religious people that they possess certainty in their formulation of who God is, the fact remains that no human mind and no human religion can finally capture in words or creeds the fullness of the mystery of God, primarily because all concepts of God are the products of the finite human mind. This means that the regular religious attempts to do so or to claim that this has actually been accomplished are little more than expressions of human idolatry. In spite of the regular refrain of ecclesiastical propaganda, there is and cannot be any such thing as “one true religion” or “one true church.” So, how can we think “different” about religion and how can we accept “uncertainty” in religion if we do not face this truth? The fact is we cannot. Imperialistic religion is always employed in the quest for power and it will always seek to impose itself upon the world. Why? Because it is the nature of human beings to build a mighty fortress behind which they can hide their rampant insecurity. If anyone is allowed to question official truth then its power to provide security disappears. That is why “religious talk” so often devolves into irrationality.
When God is defined as a supernatural power, who is both ready and willing to come to our aid, then without realizing it we have also defined human life in a negative way. To be human is now to be inadequate. We are creatures who must seek the favor of a theistic God. To illustrate this reality look at the image of God and the resulting definition of human life that dominates especially Western religious systems. In the language of our religious systems we portray ourselves either as children relating to a heavenly father or as convicted felons standing before a “hanging judge.” We are supplicants eager to please the authoritarian deity. That is why so often in our liturgical language we find ourselves saying: “Have mercy, have mercy!” Can anyone not understand how distorting that stance can be to our humanity? Is it possible for us to escape this self-definition without abandoning the traditional and popular concept of the external, supernatural God who is our parent and our judge? I do not think so. That is why a religious reformation is required for the survival of Christianity that will enable us to “think different” and to “accept uncertainty.” If we are to find a way to escape the negativity that traditional religion pours upon the dignity of human life, we will inevitably have to move away from the idea of God as a supernatural, external being. The deeper question is: “Can we move away from the theistic definition of God without moving away from God? I believe we can, but traditional religious leaders will not make that distinction and because they will not they will almost inevitably distort totally what I am trying to say. Allow me to try to unravel this torrent of theological words.


Traditionally, those of us who are the recipients of and practitioners in the Judeo-Christian faith system that marks the Western World have in our definition of God attributed to God all of the things of which we human beings are lacking. God is infinite, we are finite. God is immortal, we are mortal. God is perfect, we are imperfect. God is all powerful, omnipotent, we are limited in power. God is everywhere, omnipresent; we are bound to one place at a time. God is all knowing, omniscient, we are limited in knowledge. God is timeless, we are bound by time. These ideas seem so obvious, but the sum of these definitions of God produces a picture of human life that is lacking in both talent and in ultimate worth. God is the heavenly extension of all of the things about which we feel inadequate. So, against this common definition of God, we human beings have been taught to judge ourselves to be inadequate creatures. This insufficiency of human life forms one of the major motifs of Christian worship. In our liturgies we human beings judge ourselves constantly as those lacking in worth. We sing of God’s “amazing grace,” but we soon learn that what makes God’s grace so amazing is that it saves “a wretch like me.” We sing to God the flattering words “How great thou art,” only to learn that God’s greatness lies in the divine ability to stoop to save a sinner like me. We refer to God in our hymns as the potter and to ourselves as the passive clay begging God to “mold me and make me.” We tell God in worship that “there is no health in us,” that “we can do nothing good” without divine help, that we are not even worthy to “gather up the crumbs” from the divine table. We portray this external deity as an inescapable judge from whose all-seeing gaze we can never hide. The plea for mercy that emanates from the lips of worshipers might be appropriate for a child standing before an abusive parent or for a convicted criminal standing before a sentencing judges, but is it ever appropriate for a human being standing before a God whose name is Love?


This definition of human life is also the primary background theme in the way we Christians traditionally tell the Christ story. Jesus comes, we say, as the savior of the sinner, the redeemer of the fallen and the rescuer of the lost. We are portrayed as helpless victims begging for the intervening God to come to our aid. We are pictured as standing in the lostness of our own weakness and guilt, waiting for the punishment we deserve. When raised to our awareness it is a strange portrait of human life, but it is so pervasive that we have been dulled to its debilitating presence and are thus surprised when it is lifted into our conscious minds.


How does this God then come to our aid? We say God sent Jesus to save us from our sins. How did Jesus affect this salvation? “He died for our sins,” we reply. That is, the unforgiving Father had to punish someone and since we were not able to bear the divine wrath, God punished Jesus in our place. Is that a healthy way to view God, Jesus or ourselves? One can, however, hardly go to a Christian church without hearing this aspect of the salvation story being proclaimed. Protestants have made a mantra out of the phrase, “He died for my sins,” repeating it unquestioningly week after week. Roman Catholics refer to their primary act of worship as the reenactment of the crucifixion. They call it “the sacrifice of the Mass,” because it makes timeless the moment when Jesus suffered and died for my sins. All Christians have made a fetish out of the cleansing blood of Jesus. Protestants want to bathe in it so that their “sins might be washed away.” Evangelical hymn books are filled with such titles as: “Washed in the Blood,” “Saved by the Blood” and “There’s a Fountain filled with Blood!” One Lenten hymn in my Episcopal hymnal exhorts God to “bleed on me.” Catholics on the other hand speak of being cleansed inwardly by “drinking the blood of Jesus” in the Eucharist. When these aspects of this “blood ritual” are raised to our consciousness, we experience a sense of repulsion. Yet we Christians wallow in this mentality Sunday after Sunday, year after year. Lots of people appear to drop out of the church because they find worship vaguely uncomfortable. Perhaps one of the reasons is that this theology of human depravity and degradation unconsciously pushes us down into the depression of feeling worthless.


When we analyze this theological understanding we find that it misrepresents God, distorts Jesus and destroys our human dignity. It is wrong in every detail! First, it turns God into an unforgiving monster who must have a victim for the wrath of the offended deity. This is a concept of God apart from love, forgiveness and compassion. Unable to extract the payment due from us sinners, God kills the son to accomplish divine justice. This makes god the ultimate child abuser. What a dreadful deity this is.


Second, this theology turns Jesus into a chronic victim. His love is seen as a willingness to accept divine abuse on our behalf. Perhaps that is why we have kept him hanging on his cross in the symbol of the crucifix. This allows us to crucify him daily through our ongoing sinfulness.


Third, this theology dumps enormous amounts of guilt, unbearable guilt, onto us when we are worshipers. That is why we are taught to beat our breasts and to plead for mercy. We are, this theology proclaims, responsible for the death of Jesus. Our sins resulted in his crucifixion. We are all “Christ killers.” Guilt has become the coin of the realm in church life. It is “the gift that keeps on giving!” Has the imposition of guilt ever produced life and wholeness in anyone? Is guilt not rather one of the most distorting emotions with which human beings have to deal? Have you ever known anyone to be made whole by being told what a wretched and miserable sinner he or she is? How does this square with the promise attributed to Jesus by the Fourth Gospel that his purpose was to bring abundant life to all?


The final thing that is wrong with this theology is that it is simply not true. It is based on bad anthropology and a bad understanding of what it means to be human. One cannot build good theology on bad anthropology. When this series continues, I will begin the process of dismantling this debilitating theology by looking at our human origins through a different lens. We are not “fallen” creatures who were born in sin. “Original sin” is a concept that has to go. With it goes the portrait of Jesus as the rescuer of the fallen and the image of God as the external and displeased deity. It will be good riddance! To go here, however, will require that we “think different” and “accept uncertainty.” Not to go there is to face the death of the Christian faith. So stay tuned.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Connie from Washington, DC, writes:
Question:
I am a great fan of yours, having discovered your books about 14 years ago.  I believe I have read all of your books (I have your latest on my Kindle ready to go) and I very much look forward to your weekly column. 

I currently belong to a welcoming congregation in Washington, DC, and I wanted to ask what you would advise those of us who want Christianity to move forward to do in the way of guidance, materials and messages for teenagers.  You recently gave your approval to a Sunday school curriculum, but I believe that is for younger children. 

Based on my personal experience and observations, it is the teenage years where children, who have been brought up in a traditional or even moderately liberal “mainstream” church, drop out of organized religion and likely never return, becoming Christians in exile if even that.  At the teenage years, if not before, young people often doubt the creeds and tenets they may have found interesting and comforting in their childhood, but which no longer speak to them as they mature.  Also the Christian liturgies, while compelling in their own way, are quite formal and can be off-putting to young people. 

We currently have a young woman priest, Cara Spaccarelli, who has brought new life to our parish and who is doing wonders to bring in families with young children (she has a four-year-old and a two-year-old herself and so can really relate to these families), but my concern is what may happen to all of these beautiful, loving children as they grow older in regard to their attachment to that church.  I am also interested in seeing my parish move toward a new Christianity along the lines that you outline in your books and for that to happen, it is critical that young people stay, remain engaged and move the parish forward.  Anything you can suggest about keeping teenagers active and engaged in a Christianity that can carry forward through their adult years would be very welcome.
Answer:
Dear Connie, 

I do not know of any effective church school material for teenagers that has been produced by any denomination on a state, diocesan, synodical or national level.  I think these are hard materials to find because they are hard materials to write.  Styles, tastes and habits change so rapidly in that age group that very little permanent material stays relevant for very long. I do know of individual congregations that have developed outstanding teen-age programs.  They are almost always the product of a single individual gifted person and are not generally capable of being replicated without that person being part of the process, which is, of course, impossible. In the church that my wife and I attend when we are at home, we recently had our teenagers, with the active participation of many adults, study then build and dramatize the experience of runaway slaves with the “Underground Railroad.” Black members of our congregation took the roles of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, while white members acted out the roles of plantation owners and slaveholders. The young people were deeply involved and they were able to see the evils of slavery in very existential ways since they were transported in that world.  They also saw and experienced the negative role that the Christian Church played in the establishment and in the perpetuation of both slavery and segregation.  Remember it was the “Bible Belt” of the South that practiced slavery and resisted desegregation as if those were Christian virtues. 

It is my conviction that adult leaders who take time to know the teenage members of the congregation are better teachers out of their experience than any printed material that is available.  Committed adults are able to be honest with teenagers and to listen to them. 

You talk about church liturgies being off-putting for teenagers.  Why don’t you do a series of classes on those liturgies and ask the teenagers to tell you why they “bore”, “irritate” or seem irrelevant to them and their friends.  If they tell you, then the next question you have to ask is: “Is your church willing to change if they discover why their liturgy is “off-putting to its teenage members?”  If not, why would the teenagers bother to tell you what is not meaningful in their lives?  The same goes for the Bible.  Why not have someone who is qualified teach a class for them on the Bible and go deeply and thoroughly through the Bible with them.  The question again would be: "Are church leaders willing to be honest with teenagers once they can locate the problem?”  Church leaders are notoriously dishonest in adult education programs when it comes to sharing critical biblical scholarship even with the adult members of the congregation. They seem to be too afraid that the combination of honesty and up-to-date scholarship will be too upsetting to the Sunday school image of the God that most adult church members still worship. 

There are plenty of books to guide a teacher dealing with teenagers.  Teenagers have lots of questions, but they don’t tend to be about the Bible.  What they know about the Bible is generally wrong, but based on what they think they know they do not appear to be interested in knowing more.  Perhaps your church will become one that is willing to run these risks, but it will take both a conscious will and a significant commitment. 

In my reading audience there may be people who have had effective church experiences with teenagers.  If so, I hope you will share your wisdom with Connie at ccitro at nas.edu. 

~John Shelby Spong





Announcements
Read what Bishop Spong has to say about A Joyful Path Progressive Christian Spiritual Curriculum for Young Hearts and Minds: "The great need in the Christian church is for a Sunday school curriculum for children that does not equate faith with having a pre-modern mind. The Center for Progressive Christianity has produced just that. Teachers can now teach children in Sunday school without crossing their fingers. I endorse it wholeheartedly." 

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