My thesis: the religion of Jesus has (always) been hijacked by either fundamentalists or liberals. In the first century the main problem was with fundamentalists/legalists. In the next few centuries the church had to wrestle with various manifestations of what I am happy to call 'liberalism' - the attempt by gnostics and others to accommodate the Christian faith to a particular prevailing rationality. Today essential Christianity may be attacked from either extreme.

Basically, liberals think too much, fundamentalists too little. Who was the bishop who said, when asked whether he was liberal or conservative: 'On matters I've thought about I'm liberal, on all other matters I'm conservative' ?

Disclaimer: I'm both, though on some matters I've thought about (like abortion, for example) I'm conservative; on others I'm liberal (eg. euthanasia). On some matters I've not thought about much I'm in either camp. Because my prevailing theological stance is 'progressive evangelical' I need to read something like the mainline/liberal journal The Christian Century - which I do, right through, every issue. Most of my evangelical friends wouldn't bother, which is a pity.

But the conservative side of me says there's a demonic conspiracy to destroy the simple faith Jesus has passed on to us, and liberal theologians are - often unwittingly - doing that pretty successfully. They get the media's headlines for some quite creative ideas debunking the historicity of various aspects of Christian origins. Those are the books your secular bookshops will place in their Religion section. A decade ago there was New Zealand's Professor Geering, now it's Australia's Barbara Theiring and Peter Cameron, U.S. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, Briton A.N.Wilson, et al.... A.N. Wilson, for example, in his book entitled Jesus, wrote, Jesus... [had] a brilliant flair for shrewd moral teaching and he would have been horrified to think of a "church" let alone people worshipping him as if he were "divine." He certainly did not rise from the dead; that was all a mistake.'

What am I saying? Simple: theological liberalism is the death-knell of the church. (See my home page for articles about how various fundamentalisms are doing likewise, but with a very different agenda). Mainline Protestant denominations which have become liberal are dying. But they're intellectually/theologically exciting too. Aye there's the rub...

The origins of the (Western) liberal mind-set

In the U.S. socio-political liberalism shaped the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It has a deep belief that people are inherently equal, they have a right to pursue their individuality in an open society, and the State must use its power and authority to secure their rights and help the needier among them.

This form of liberalism was nurtured in the Enlightenment emphases on social justice, individual rights and individual fulfilment, virtue and excellence. It is essentially both idealistic/ optimistic and pragmatic, believing in human improvement (though not always in human perfectibility).

These days it's an especially white middle-class phenomenon, wrestling with problems like 'how should a liberal society accommodate the illiberal?' (as in John Rawls, Political Liberalism, Columbia University Press, 1994).

There have been good outcomes: Roe vs. Wade ended back-alley abortions. And bad: now you need a PC handbook if you're to make public pronouncements on anything. And liberalism's close cousin, individualism, is responsible for the tendency of modern parents putting their happiness before the well-being of their children. (Soon, in America, 40% of children will be born out of wedlock.)

Theological liberalism

The older Christian liberalism (sometimes called 'neo-Protestantism') was presumed to have commenced with Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799), and died with World War I and Karl Barth's Epistle to the Romans (1919), with his emphases on the majesty of God and the dynamic centrality of the Word of God for our faith and life. (Barth likened liberal theologians to someone entering a boat a hundred yards above the Rhine falls and then drifting past the point of no return.)

This form of liberalism was often reactive - and particularly led the way to freedom from the constrictions of Calvinism. It was rooted in German idealism, biblical higher criticism, science and the new learnings as they were thought to 'antiquate' Scripture. This older liberalism was optimistic; humans were thought to be basically good. The first world war put paid to that idea...

But theological liberalism won't (ever) die. It will always be reacting to rigid conservatisms. Thus: Harry Emerson Fosdick's pivotal 1922 sermon 'Shall the Fundamentalists Win?' and his book The Modern Use of the Bible. Fosdick moved theology and higher criticism out of the study and classroom into the pulpit, the pew and the home.

Then in the early 1960s a slipped disc immobilized an Anglican bishop, and the result was Honest to God, which became so popular in the UK that it edged the New English Bible into second place. Near the beginning J A T Robinson confesses, 'I cannot claim to have understood all I am trying to transmit.' The only intrinsic evil, he said, is lack of love. On the other side of the Atlantic Harvey Cox's The Secular City (1965) and the 'Death of God' people were the focus of liberalism's new thinking. (See chapter 3 of Peter Berger's A Rumor of Angels for an introduction to these liberalisms).

Fundamentalists called them 'modernists'; liberals now prefer the term 'moderate' (particularly if they're in a predominantly fundamentalist denomination like the Southern Baptist Convention).

We owe many debts to liberal scholarship - particularly its rigorous approach to biblical criticism. And they have given us back a human Jesus. (However, the most liberal of American denominations, the United Church of Christ, has published a hymnal in which the historical Jesus is genderless!).

Liberal thinking is likely to become detached from primitive Christianity's truth-claims. Liberal Christians are uncomfortable about evangelism. But syncretism - or at least deference to other belief-systems - is alien to the biblical faith. Elijah mocking the priests of Baal, Isaiah deriding Bel and Nebo, or Paul's confrontation with the pagans at Lystra - the modern counterparts of these ancient prophets wouldn't get a hearing in modern liberal seminaries...

Liberal thinking is obsessed with modernity, contemporaneity, the modern world. Their key dictum: 'moderns can no longer believe [these ancient notions]'. Liberal thinking is imprisoned within the thoughtforms of contemporary culture - it's educated, cerebral, intellectual, middle class, academy-centred, and (as the English say), 'nice'.

They're - to varying degrees - contemptuous of 'orthodoxy'. Their methodology: reason. Their God is a reasonable God. 'The heart,' says Spong, 'cannot finally worship what the mind has rejected'.

Liberal theology is especially uncomfortable with the supernatural and the miraculous. It's humanism in religious dress. The tragedy of it all is in its negativity - and skill at demolishing cherished beliefs, telling us what is not true anymore, but offering little that's constructive. At least 'conservative' Christianity combines a faithfulness to the founding traditions of the Christian faith. It tries to link back to the robust faith which changed the world.

[For a good anthology of articles on American theological liberalism - mostly pre-Spong - read Robert Michaelsen & Wade Clark Roof, Liberal Protestantism, NY: Pilgrim Press, 1986]

......

Now, to Spong...

The Rt. Rev. John S. Spong is Bishop of Newark. He was mentored, he says, by 'English bishop and New Testament scholar named John Albert Thomas Robinson [whose] echoes were heard in me every time I spoke and certainly every time I wrote.

If you've got a couple of hours for an interesting read point Alta Vista to John Shelby Spong and browse his Bishop's Voice letters.

Samples (quotes from these letters, unless indicated otherwise):
# 'The Supernatural Being that we have traditionally called God has increasingly been rendered impotent by the explosion in human knowledge over the last five hundred years.'

# 'The Vatican has now declared that Galileo was correct and the Church was wrong in that 17th century dispute. But if Galileo was correct, then the whole world view of the Bible is wrong!'

# 'A literal creed, an inerrant Bible and an infallible pope are today naive religious ideas. If facing these realities is the definition of heresy, then it is easy to understand why thinking people have abandoned the Church in droves, leaving it to the fearful and dependent who scream heresy whenever their security systems are threatened.'

# 'The major theological task of our times is to seek a new language of faith or at the very least a new way to translate pre-modern theistic categories into the post-modern, non-theistic language of tomorrow.'

.....

In the first chapter of his Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism Spong writes: 'There will be some who, upon reading this volume, will be disturbed and even angry. I regret that. I have no desire to make uncomfortable anyone's fragile life. There is nothing new here and my dates and "facts" are still debated in theological circles.'

Yes, it is true to say that Spong's theology and hermeneutics are in the mainstream of mainline Christianity's thinking.

Spong's general approach

[Note: I need to offer some fairly lengthy quotes to be fair to Spong].

Spong is an Anglican/Episcopalian dedicated to 'scripture, tradition and reason' as the sources of its authority. Reason, he says, implies an openness to new truth, insight and learning. As I read him, reason heads the hierarchy of authority, with scripture and tradition a distant second and third...

The content of religious faith is, for Spong, 'the human attempt to place a dimension of transcendence in the experience of the mystery of God into meaningful words and rational concepts.' So religious faith is always a human creation. All credal statements, which are products of human beings living at a particular time and place and trying to make sense of what they ultimately believe is real, are human creations. At any time (including the present) 'when one articulates a system of beliefs the articulating person will always be bound by the prejudices and limitations of the world that produc ed that person.' Every faith-system is reflective of the level of knowledge available to those who shaped it. 'So no religious faith-system can be invested with eternity, inerrancy or infallibility, nor can anyone claim for any human faith-system a universal or timeless statement of truth. There is no such thing as a timeless or universal being who could articulate it...'

So 'despite the assumptions of the Bible, the earth is not flat. It is not the center of the universe. God is therefore not looking down on us from beyond the sky. This God does not invade our world with miracle and magic to fight our wars, destroy our enemies or do our bidding. Virgins do not conceive. Resurrection cannot mean physical resuscitation and the restarting of bodily processes after three days of death. People cannot ascend on their own gravity-defying power into the sky of a Ptolemaic universe that is no longer believed to exist. Both human truth and traditional moral standards have been relativized.'

'If the inability to believe in this pre-modern world of miracle and magic constitutes heresy, then everyone who has completed a fourth grade science textbook is either guilty or in denial.'

[For example]: # 'The biblical view of the virgin birth died with the discovery of the egg cell in the 18th century... The virgin birth was based upon the ancient theory that all the woman did was to incubate and nurture the man's seed to maturity.'

[For example]: # 'The Noah story, or the splitting of the Red Sea story, could not be literally true, to say nothing of the stories of Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water and ascending to the heaven of a ptolemaic universe that had ceased to exist with Copernicus.'

'[Another] manifestation of this decline in religious certainty is that people today no longer have confidence in the reality of life after death. Life after death was a powerful and consoling idea in a believing age...'

However, it is unfair to accuse Spong of total faithlessness, as some fundamentalists have done. He writes: 'The creeds are as dated as those words and concepts are, but the creeds still point me toward a concept of God that breaks open the vocabulary in which they have been composed. And the resurrection of Jesus is for me an experience that was real, of enormous power, beyond the capacity of any words to capture, but the actions of the people who were embraced by that experience say that it had a certain validity. I do not ever want to be literal about the words I use to articulate my faith. I do not want to make unchanging idols out of the formularies of my tradition. I cannot conceive of anyone finding credibility in the authoritarian pronouncements of an infallible pope, an inerrant bible or literal creeds, but at the same time I cannot deny the experience that lies behind the words that seek to describe this Christ. I cannot walk away from the faith to which the ancient words of the creed still point. I cannot deny the reality of that moment called Easter that changed the face of human history.'

Spong's Bible

We have literalized the gospels, Spong complains. 'When one realises this one can no longer invest the words of the bible with any ultimacy. Try to imagine, if you will, how the same experience of Christ might have been processed - try to imagine the words and concepts that might have been employed - if whatever the meaning and power of the life of Christ was had occurred in the late twentieth century... instead of in Judea in the first century. Would we have defined this experience in terms of Passover lambs, Yom Kippur sacrific es, Son of man images and suffering servant figures? Of course not, for these concepts are not today part of our life. The issue is whether the experience behind the contents is similarly a human creation.'

Spong's Jesus

(See my homepage article on this topic for a lengthier discussion).

The basic Christian interpretive myth of Jesus, writes Spong. as God's divine rescue operation, designed to save a fallen creation, is 'inoperative'.

Jesus was not born of a virgin, since Mary had probably been raped. (Born of a Woman?)

'The idea that somehow the very nature of the heavenly God required the death of Jesus as a ransom to be paid for our sins is ludicrous. A human parent who required the death of his or her child as a satisfaction for a relationship that had been broken would be either arrested or confined to a mental institution.'

'The heart of my faith lies in the one whom I believe to have entered so fully into the meaning of God that in some mysterious way he broke the barrier between life and death, between time and eternity and opened that world - that new level of consciousness - to all of us that come to live inside this Christ experience.'

Spong's Anthropology

'Human beings,' according to Spong, 'have emerged into consciousness through billions of years of evolutionary struggle, that we are still emerging, and we carry within ourselves the heritage and the seeds of our history, the passions of our animal struggle for survival. We are marked by the self-centredness born in the insecurity of our evolutionary past. There was no fall, and if there was no fall then we no longer understand why we have some need for a divine rescuer, and so we no longer have a role to which we can assign the Christ.'

Spong's Gospel

After Spong had prayed at a Buddhist altar in Hong Kong, he wrote about his rejecting the saving uniqueness of Christ and finding all religions equally valid ways to God. 'I am not a Buddhist and do not expect to become one,' he wrote. 'I do not believe, however, that the God I worship has been captured solely in my words, my forms or my concepts. My conviction is that the true God, the divine mystery, the essence of holiness, is within and beyond all of these ancient worship traditions. God,' he continued, 'is pointed to by all, captured by none. So, when I visit a Buddhist temple it is not for me a pagan place, and its worship is not the worship of idols as I was taught in my early Christian upbringing. It is rather a holy place where human beings different from me have felt the presence of God.'

Addressing the key issue for seekers - What do you think of Christ? - Spong questions whether we can believe any longer in Jesus' unique universal ultimacy; or with integrity continue to support and engage in a missionary enterprise designed to convert. 'I will not make any further attempt to convert the Buddhist, the Jew, the Hindu or the Moslem.' [See Bishop Spong and Other Religions, in the Religious Pluralism and Global Mission (Summer 1992) issue of Trinity's quarterly magazine Mission & Ministry].

'I do not deny the truth of God found in any other faith tradition, whether it be Jewish or Islamic or Hindu or Buddhist or any other. I insist in no way that God must operate on my levels of understanding, reflect my prejudices and affirm the power-needs of my particular institution.'

Spong and sexuality

'The Church,' writes Spong, 'knows that homosexual persons have always served among its ordained clergy, but does not want the world to know it... Coffers would be threatened by such an admission' [so the church is dishonest]. 'The policy of the ecclesiastical world on sexuality has always been a version of "don't ask, don't tell." So survival in the priesthood has been accomplished over the centuries by encouraging clandestine, dishonest and dehumanizing behavior.'

Further: 'I am saddened that gay and lesbian members of the church are subjected to continuing abuse. My conviction is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which proclaims the message of God's unbounded love for all that God has made, including God's gay and lesbian children, is worth defending with all my might and defend that Gospel I will. I am also convinced that I do so with the support of the vast majority of the clergy and lay leadership of this Diocese.'

'This century has finally learned that gay and lesbian people are not heterosexual people who, because of their moral depravity, have chosen to live sinful homosexual lives. They are not people who need to be rescued from this evil and converted or restored to normalcy. They are simply people born with a different sexual orientation who have been inaccurately defined as abnormal and condemned as immoral by an ignorant heterosexual majority. Once again, as this new consciousness has dawned, the Body of Christ has been torn between the dying stereotype and the new learning.'

Spong and assisted suicide

'When the capacity to do and to be that kind of Self [made in God's image] is irreparably gone, then real life itself is also gone. A breathing cadaver with a beating heart is not the person we have known and loved. Terminating biological processes is not terminating life as we Christians understand it... The sacredness of my life is not ultimately found in my biological extension. It is found rather in the touch, the smile and the love of those to whom I can knowingly respond. When that ability to respond disappears permanently, so, I believe, does the meaning and the value of my biological life.'

'I favor both active and passive euthanasia, and I also believe that assisted suicide should be legalized, but only under circumstances that would effectively preclude both self-interest and malevolence.'

'My personal creed asserts that every person is sacred, created in God's image; that every person is loved by God in Jesus Christ, and that every person is called into the fullness of his or her humanity by the Holy Spirit...

'I see the holiness of life enhanced, not diminshed, by letting people have a say in how they choose to die.'

.....

Heretic? You'll have to judge. Spong likes to use Martin Luther's 'Here I stand: I can do no other.' 'I am alienated in large measure from that part of the church that claims too much for its symbols, but I am also alienated from those who do not believe that those symbols point beyond themselves to a reality that can transform my life and make me almost a budding mystic - but the kind of mystic that I am is profoundly and fully identified at this moment as Christian.'

......

WHERE I LIKE SPONG...

With Bishop Spong, I concur that 'God and God's truth can only be served as we approach the awesome wonder and mystery of God with genuine humility.'

With him I would also 'insist in no way that God must operate on my levels of understanding, reflect my prejudices and affirm the power-needs of my particular institution.'

Yes, with the bishop I would affirm that we are made in the image of God for communion with God. This means that we can receive a true revelation of God and know God but only within the limits of our human nature and reason.

With Spong, I believe we should employ our God-given rationality to examine the great issues of religion and life. Since Augustine and Aquinas Western Christians have not been afraid of a reasoned faith.

I agree that dialogue between the world's religions, philosophies, and world views is appropriate. We agree that we ought to be open to seeing elements of truth in all the world's religions. Such truth arises from God's general revelation of who God is in and through the created order and in human self-consciousness.

I happen to agree with Spong on the vexed contemporary issue of assisted suicide. I believe critical biblical scholarship, although a mixed blessing, has encouraged a more rigorous examination of the biblical texts.

(With evangelical scholar Dr. Leon Morris), I am encouraged to see other meanings in the Easter-event than operations of a God of sacrifice.

And yes, the church has been guilty of gross hypocrisy on the whole homosexuality issue...

WHERE SPONG AND I PART COMPANY...

I agree with Spong when he rejects both a fundamentalism that 'takes everything literally' and a liberalism that takes nothing in the Bible with any real seriousness. However, Spong's notion of fundamentalism seems to include anyone who takes the literal meaning of the NT texts seriously. More of that in a moment...

Spong is right: Conservative religious traditions have always asserted that "the faith" was not the product of human inquiry. 'It was rather revealed by God in some dramatic and complete way.' With that much I concur. But I can't agree that a corpus of truth has 'been understood and transmitted infallibly by Church leaders since its reception.' As Luther put it, church authorities and church councils can err.

Back to reason: the Scriptural evaluation of human philosophies and religions is not a fundamentally positive one. Humans are int he grip of sinful condition the Bible describes as darkness. St. Paul himself, a highly trained thinker and a devout member of the people of God, had distorted the Biblical revelation and found himself opposing God in Christ and persecuting the Church. He had his eyes opened only at the appearance of the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. According to the Bible, the problem we have in knowing God is not that we are creatures, but that we are sinners. We can receive God's revelation, but we distort what we receive.

Bishop Spong implies that the 20th century presents a fundamentally new challenge to the Christian faith. Wrong. St. Paul speaks of the Gospel as being an offense to the Gentiles and a stumbling block to the Jews. 'Secular' philosophers over 2000 years have been offended by the Gospel.

The uniqueness of Christ, in particular, has always been a scandal. Spong likes to speak ('humbly') of the mystery of God. Fair enough. But he is weak on the notion of incarnation: Christians have been right to affirm that the transcendent God has come to us in the person of Jesus Christ. We can actually know God, in Christ. That is the essence of our faith.

How is it that the original eye-witnesses of the events upon which the Christian faith relies could have got it all wrong? They were not describing events they saw, but articulating experiences in a meta-historical way. Spong's notion of 'myth' is at odds with any view that Christianity is rooted in human history.

Theologically, for liberals like Spong 'sin' (if they use the word) is primarily alienation. For those who take the Bible more seriously, sin means we are guilty before God. And thus the notions of substitution, ransom, atonement and so on, whilst they are better understood in a 'sacrificial' religious culture, take on special meaning.

Re other world religions: as someone has put it, 'it is both realistic and courteous to believe Muslims and Hindus when they assert that their religions differ profoundly from Christianity. Bishop Spong simply hasn't been talking to the serious adherents of the world's religions. For example, Islam makes a point of saying, God has no son, whereas Christianity confesses that Jesus is the Son of God incarnate. In its more mystical forms, Hinduism declares that we are God, whereas Biblical faith says that we are creatures made in the image of God.'

Back to our beliefs about God. As C. S. Lewis wrote: The god of whom no dogmas are believed is a mere shadow. He will not produce the fear of the Lord in which wisdom begins, and therefore, will not produce that love in which it is consummated. Minimalist religion offers little or nothing that can convince, convert, or (in the best sense) console...

We ought to be suspicious of anyone who offers a new key to the Scripture. For example Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science claimed to possess a special knowledge which reinterpreted the Scriptures. She claimed, for example, that death was an illusion. Yet she died.

Spong (like Bultmann before him) likes to say that the Gospels, in particular, have to be de-mythologized. Spong, to be fair to him, does not like to be called 'liberal' in reference to his hermeneutics. For him, every book in the Bible is 'inspired' in the sense that everywhere there are important moral principles. Conservatives interpret many/most or all of the biblical events as literally. Spong's retort would be that the biblical people didn't intend for us to take their words all that literally.

Take, for example, the notion of 'midrash'. Although there were various rabbinical exegetical schools, some - like Akiba's - were somewhat mystical and imaginative. Now, if such midrash pervades the Gospels, how do we account for Luke - a Gentile, and writing to a Gentile - writing a midrash Gospel? Luke is explicit about his taking pains to verify the historicity of the events he is describing. He had talked to eyewitnesses who had seen them firsthand. Spong doesn't do a convincing job of persuading us that Luke and the other Gospels should be considered midrash. (This idea needs more space than I've given it here, but I hope you get the general idea).

Another Anglican scholar/bishop, Stephen Neill, wrote in his autobriography: 'If it could be shown, as clear historical evidence, that the bones of Jesus of Nazareth had mouldered away in a Palestinian grave... I would cease to be a worshipping Christian... I could not partake in a Holy Communion which was simply the commemoration of a long-departed friend' (God's Apprentice: the autobiolgraphy of Bishop Stephen Neill, H & S, 1991, p.66).

No, Bishop Spong's relativized Christ is too removed from reality for this believer.

Rabbi Neusner wanted to ask Jesus, 'Who do you think you are - God?' The answer: Jesus does not think he is God - he knows he is God. And so do I.

Shalom! Rowland Croucher