John Shelby Spong – ‘A New Christianity For A New World: Why traditional faith is dying & how a new faith is being born.’ (HarperCollins, New York 2001.)

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The theistic thinking that undergirds conversion activities is dead. We Christians today now that we possess neither certainty nor eternal truth. We know we do not possess the sole pathway to God, for there is no sole pathway.

If God is not a being but the Ground of All being, the source of life and the source of love, then God surely cannot be contained in any religious system, nor can any people continue to live as if God were the tribal deity of their particular nation or group. Being, life, and love transcend all boundaries. No sacred scripture of any religious tradition can any longer claim that in its pages the fullness of God has been captured. Exclusive religious propaganda can no longer be sustained. The idea that Jesus is the only way to God or that only those who have been washed in the blood of Christ are ever to be listed among the saved, has become anathema and even dangerous in our world.

That is not all. To discover a God beyond theism is also to acknowledge that ecclesiastical creeds also never capture the truth of God, all they do is point to it. …. there can be no ultimately defining, and thus limiting, creeds in a post-theistic Christianity that is now struggling to be born. We will rather see our creedal past as a necessary stage through which we had to walk. That past can no longer bind us as we break into a limitless post-theistic experience.

… The Bible is a doorway into God, but when I enter that domain of God, I discover that all of the Bible’s word pictures and word symbols must be broken open so that the word of God can speak to us in new accents calling us to new meanings. …. none of these sacrifices required by the death of theism causes us to lose that essential experience of God that Christians believe we have met in Jesus. Rather, all they do is to challenge the idolatry of our claims that the holy, mysterious, wondrous experience of God could ever be captured in any human religious system or be made to serve any institution’s power-needs. Disarming claims never invalidates personal religious experience.

… So this Christ remains my doorway into God. It is not, perhaps, a doorway that everyone can use, and it is certainly not the only doorway; but it is my doorway.

…God is, for me, the Ground of Being seen in the being of every living thing, the source of love found in the ability to love present in every creature and the source of life calling everyone everywhere into the fullness of life. This is the God I see through the lens of my time and place in history, the God I believe I have met in Jesus of Nazareth. That is why he is Lord for me. So as theism passes into post-theism, we experience the same God, but in the accents of a new century. I believe that this expanded consciousness, this rejection of theism, this openness to what lies beyond theism, is finally a better way to honour the Christ who is called by those of us who seek God inside the Christian perspective “the son of God”. pp179-184

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“God was in Christ” is the ecstatic exclamation that the apostle Paul made long before he first tried to explain how it was that God had been met in this Jesus. The Christians of the theistic past and the Christians of the post-theistic future will be united not by their explanations, but by their experiences, which are finally all that we have of the divine.

Explanations are human creations. Explanations result from opening our eyes to the trauma of self-consciousness, from seeing ourselves as separate from and defined against the world itself, fro engaging the shock of nonbeing, and from asserting that we live, love, and have the courage to be because only through such living, loving, and being can we make sense of our experience of the divine. Living, loving and being thus ultimately relates us to the holy God. … That is, I believe, what the Johannine write understood when he had Jesus say, “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). That is what I mean when I call myself a Christian. pp 216-217

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So what does it matter that we reformulate the tenents of traditional Christianity or attempt to redefine God in nontheistic terms? … it matters how one thinks of God … We need a reformation in our thinking about God not to give people a comfortable God-figure that they can keep in the God-room of their home – a room that they enter periodically to do “God-things.” No, we need a reformation so that the future will invite people into the realm of God, where they can act corporately to enhance life, to expand love, and to encourage being.

It matters. God matters. The realm of God matters. pp 230-231

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