What follows is a sermon I delivered at the Columbus, Indiana UU congregation this past Sunday. I did it as part of their ongoing heretic of the month series. I chose Spong as a living heretic. The quotations are in-text and don’t follow any particular format. They’re all from Spong’s books, which are found easily enough in libraries and in bookstores. Hope you’re well and warm.
Why Christianity must change or die. The sins of scripture. The homophobia of Paul. God as divine child abuser: The sadomasochism in the heart of Christianity. These aren’t discussion topics for a humanist UU congregation. They’re book and chapter titles from the works of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. This is a man who has earned his spot as heretic of the month.
Spong and his books are found in the libraries of many a UU church, but the first thing John Shelby Spong wants you to know is that he is a Christian. Part of what makes his career so remarkable is that, from his early days as a parish minister in the Episcopal church in the fifties through his retirement from the office of bishop in 2000, he has maintained his identity as a Christian.
But Spong’s Christianity is, to say the least, radical. One of the major tenets of Spong’s faith, and one of the most controversial, is that he maintains a belief in God, but he isn’t a theist. Here’s how he explained that paradox in Why Christianity Must Change Or Die :”The God I know is not concrete or specific. This God is rather shrouded in mystery, wonder, and awe. The deeper I journey into this divine presence, the less any literalized phrases, including the phrases of the Christian creed, seem relevant. The God I know can only be pointed to; this God can never be enclosed by propositional statements (4).”
Spong, then, sheds the traditional Judeo-Christian view of an intervening, human-like God in favor of this God who is the mystery of life. At the end of that same book, he says: “I am first, last, and always a believer. I define myself theologically as a believer who lives in exile. I have lived and worshiped as a believer. I shall continue to do so and to be so until the day I die. When that moment comes, I expect to enter even more deeply into the reality of the God in whom I have lived and moved and had my being. I am therefore at peace (228).”
Spong has tried over the years to urge the church to realize that a pre-scientific faith will not work. He asserts that faith in a prayer-answering, meddling god with his supernatural/human, miracle-working, virgin-born son is dying, and Spong believes that future Christians won’t cling to all those metaphysical beliefs. Instead, Spong would have believers try to live in tune with the spirit of God by following the teachings of Jesus rather than simply believing things about Jesus.
That move is terribly important. Because if your faith is centered on metaphysical beliefs, beliefs that people have risen from the dead and been born from people who have never had sex, for instance, then the text, the Bible, is essential. It is inarguable. The stories of the Bible must be protected as being newspaper-true. And that view of Scripture will always have the Bible in argument with science. But the Christianity of John Spong says, we know full well the Bible is a human document. It has its beautiful parts, ‘blessed are the poor,’ ‘do unto others,’ but it also has its horrible parts, stoning homosexuals and sassy children, for instance. When a person can see the Bible for the mixed bag of texts that it really is, then the miracle stories don’t need to be believed literally. They are true in that they point to something about Jesus and his teaching, perhaps, but not true in that Jesus had coffee on the beach with Peter two days after he died. Spong calls the resurrection, the virgin birth and the miracle stories “metaphorical truth and literal nonsense.”
It seems to me that this is what is most important about Spong’s work: what he has to say about the Bible. He reads the Bible stories of Jesus and sees a very human figure whose real transcendence lies not in raising the dead or healing the sick but in being able to talk about unconditional human love in a time when such a message wasn’t all that welcome, a time a lot like today, perhaps. He argues that Christians need to demythologize Jesus, and says this about that effort:
“The meaning of Jesus is found where his being made contact with the being of all human life. Hence we look at his freedom to be and at the effect that freedom had on others. We look at his security, his fulfillment, his peace, his capacity to give and love and care (This Hebrew Lord, 167).”
And so, the virgin birth, rather than an anti-science newspaper description of a miracle, becomes a reminder that the people who wrote the gospels believed that there was something about Jesus that was unique among the human beings around him. And on and on. And what is most important is not belief, but love.
“For Jesus,” Spong writes, “to be the Messiah meant that he must bring love to the unloved, freedom to the bound, wholeness to the distorted, peace to the insecure. Only in this way could he overcome the sin of the world. The only power that can ultimately save is love, and love was the deepest meaning of Jesus’ life (THL, 172).”
But as we’ve said, Spong more than admits that the Bible also has ugly parts. In fact, he wrote an entire book about it: The Sins of Scripture. Spong’s discussion of Scripture around the issue of homosexuality and the church is more than enlightening.
Homosexuality, of course, is a hot button issue for Biblical literalists. I was reminded of this recently. This past Fall, the Danville church did a rally on the Hendricks County courthouse steps in favor of marriage equality. An ACLU lawyer who spoke said he was afraid to stand behind the podium because he expected either gunshots or lightning doing this in such a small town.
But most of our rally went very well. We had great community support. A police officer who was assigned to keep an eye on us crazy liberals said, ‘well, I just can’t see why anyone would be denied being placed on their partner’s insurance policies.’ Many people honked and waved at us, and some used more than one finger.
But by far my favorite protestor was a man who committed a drive-by Christian witness. A man drove by with his family, and as he sped away, he screamed ‘read the Bible!!’ I took the podium and delivered a spontaneous five-minute sermon on what the Bible really says about homosexuality.
A great deal of my ammo came from John Shelby Spong. Spong takes the Bible that is quoted by fundamentalists to justify their fears and prejudices and by talking about it in depth and in its original context removes it as fuel for the fires of hate.
Spong discusses, for example, Leviticus, which says “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman: It is an abomination.” First, he offers some Biblical scholarship. He reminds his readers that this command is found in what is called the holiness code, which was written by the priests of Israel as a way to set their nation apart from and above the nations around them. It’s important that the holiness code was written when the Jews were in exile in Babylon. Kosher dietary laws spring up. It’s pretty difficult to eat with someone if you have to eat Kosher food in a Kosher kitchen. But it preserves Jewish identity through exile. The same with the sexual laws in the holiness code. The Jews used these laws to separate themselves from their neighbors and preserve their identity when they were forced to live in exile. They are certainly not useful anymore, but that didn’t stop people mailing Spong letters saying “Have you read Leviticus 20?” when he began to work for LGBT equality.
About those letters, he writes “I doubt if they were referring to the injunction in Leviticus that warns, ‘You shall not round off the hair on your temples or mar the edges of your beard (Lev. 19:27) (Sins of Scripture, 124).” And when church leaders in his own denomination were saying that decaying rules about homosexuality must be kept in place to preserve the unity of the church, Spong wrote: “A church unified in prejudice cannot possibly be the Body of Christ. Can anyone imagine a church preserving its unity by tolerating slavery in its midst? Is there any difference between that situation and tolerating homophobia? (Sins, 126)”
He isn’t a theist. He doesn’t believe in the traditional view of the divinity of Jesus. He doesn’t believe in a physical resurrection or ascension. Plenty of people have asked, how is Spong still a Christian? Including some of his fellow Episcopal bishops. But it is notoriously difficult to fire a bishop in the Episcopal form of government. I think that over Spong’s career, he has caused several Episcopal higher-ups to re-think their church’s system of governing. They may have lusted after congregational government, in which it is much easier to get rid of pesky ministers. Nevertheless, Spong retired without being burned at the stake.
But not without getting more than one earful from some important Episcopals. Rowan Williams, who is now Archbishop of Canterbury, said this of Spong’s continuing to claim the name ‘Christian:’ “Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?
Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this; and – if I can’t try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit – I don’t know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.”
One blogger I read recently wondered why Spong doesn’t just become a Unitarian. And we’d sure be glad to have him. But Christianity and the Jesus story are central to Spong’s life and faith, and he has simply decided not to allow anyone else define whether he is a Christian or not. And there’s something we can all learn there. You and I might hear that someone is a Christian and pre-judge them. They must believe in the resurrection, the virgin birth. They must be homophobic. But Spong, and the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship, and many, many other members of the Christian faithful would prove us wrong.
Spong is a living Christian heretic who has made a great difference in Christianity and beyond. He has introduced a new generation of people to a more sensible way of seeing religious texts and religious figures, one which allows metaphor and image without demanding that we shut our eyes and ears to science. May we ourselves be so bold.
I am Italian. Now, as far as I know I do not have any Italian ancestry. Hell, I don’t even know any Italians. I love Italian cuisine. I can’t cook it – unless you count spaghetti and a jar of Ragu – but I love it. And I’ve begun to acquire a taste for red wine. I’ve never visited Italy but I’d love to. From what I’ve seen from Travel Channel programs they’re lifestyle is awesome. So I declare myself an Italian. I’m sure the Census Bureau and any fellow Italians I introduce myself to won’t mind a bit.
My wife says she wants to be Spanish. That makes us a multicultural family. Cool.
Settle down. You can construct a Spong voodoo doll and whack it with the Book of Concord.
I would just say that, first, Spong knows plenty about Christianity. Second, why should all the Roman church leaders after 425 get to decide what it really means to be a Christian? Why not Arius or Origen or Montanus or Servetus or any of the litany of names deemed heretics, some of whom were killed by the ‘orthodox’ who were led by the Holy Spirit to burn people? Why not just go ahead and admit that Jesus’ message has always, always, been open to interpretation? You have chosen to trust the line of the church which ended up with the most people. Liberal Christians like Spong chose another tradition, but it is a tradition which has always been alive and well within Christianity.
I honestly don’t know how someone can look at Jesus’ stories, the Good Samaritan for instance, and then say that what is most important is not what we do in the world but what we believe about Jesus and the godhead. Jesus did not say anything like ‘if you don’t believe the right things about me, you’ll go to hell.’ He did say that if a person doesn’t feed the hungry and clothe the naked, etc., that they will go to hell. It seems to me that’s Spong’s message, without the bit about burning forever. Jesus was about social action, not about creedal belief systems. You disagree, I know, but I don’t know how you can mock someone who seems to feel passionately about Jesus’ actual message rather than whether he flew through the air back to Dad or got up after being dead for three days.
If ‘Christian’ still means someone who follows the teachings of Jesus, then Spong is very much a Christian.
One more thing. Here’s my take, from experience. In the traditional Christian church, all that is really required to remain in good standing is to participate in the sacraments and believe certain things. As I read Luke, Jesus would have hated that kind of faith. Some of us think the creeds killed Christianity. We love the message of Jesus just as much as you do, and we understand it pretty damned well. We just think he talked more about what a person should do than what a person should believe.
As well, we see that many resurrection and virgin birth and healing stories came before the Jesus stories. When we look at that fact with the same rules of logic as we apply in every other arena, we realize that these stories of Jesus are probably intended by the authors to tell us that they believed Jesus to be outside the normal realm of humanity. You’re betting on the veracity and good intentions of a lot of men who, historically, had a lot to gain or lose when they decided orthodoxy (property, for instance). After all, Constantine, not the church, called the Council of Nicea because he was worried about unrest in the Empire.
Just a few miscellaneous points.
I’m sorry about leaving that snarky comment last night. I wouldn’t appreciate it if someone did that on my blog. In blogspeak, it was trollish.
I get a little irrational whenever Spong comes up. The idea that the man takes a paycheck from the Church grates on me.
Don’t be sorry. Defend your position. Should all Christians think and believe exactly alike? Who gets to decide what’s right? Constantine? Nicea? What about the fact that Jesus says that people who don’t do good works will go to hell? And the Good Samaritan, isn’t that a call for no-matter-who-you-are helping? What about the fact that some of those ’spirit-inspired Christians’ who decided orthodoxy also burned people alive? Doesn’t that go against Jesus’ teaching about loving people no matter what? And if you say that the spirit was working through or in spite of all that, why couldn’t an all-powerful god come up with a better process? Free will? Well, then free will is only God giving us the rope to hang ourselves, isn’t it? Is the way to heaven through believing things we can’t see or test? And again, does Jesus say that?
No need to be sorry about your comment. But there are many types of Christianity.
I wasn’t apologizing because I’m afraid to defend what I said. I was apologizing because I intended the comment as a smart-alleck response and not a substantive reply to anything you said.
What annoys me is that Spong is being paid by a Church whose teaching he is actively trying to undermine. That doesn’t speak well of him and it speaks even less well of that Church. The guy should have been excommunicated years ago but, no, they gave him a frickin’ mitre. There are Christians donating their money to a Church that is supposed to be teaching the Christian faith to their children and this joker is taking part of that money so that he can write “The Sins of Scripture.” Pardon me if I don’t respect him. You are a far, far more honorable man. When you could no longer call yourself an orthodox Christian at least you were decent enough to join a religious organization with which you could agree. If you’d stuck around and tried to lead a revolt you would have lost my respect. He can write all the books attacking orthodox Christianity he wants. I’m not saying the guy needs to be silenced. But he should be decent enough not to do it while making his living from the Church and shielded by the ecclesiastical equivalent of tenure.
Historic Christianity has always been defined by the creeds. If someone doesn’t like the creeds they are of course free to call themselves a Christian. But I, as a Christian who confesses the creeds on a weekly basis, also get to say that they’re not a Christian in any historically accurate sense of the word. Words mean things. I can say I belong to Mensa but that organization may wish to differ with me. And since they’re Mensa they get to define who they are. So if someone wants to call himself a Christian it might be good to consult Christians and find out what they mean by the word. And we don’t mean “someone who likes Jesus and thinks he said same way neat stuff.” This doesn’t have anything to do with people going to heaven or hell. I don’t think anyone is saved by checking the right doctrinal boxes. This is about maintaining sensible definitions of words and simple honesty.
Historic Christianity has NOT always been defined by the creeds! There have always been Christians who can’t confess that Jesus is of one substance with the Father. Always. You are arguing to preserve only creedal Christianity as the ‘true’ Christianity. Are the Disciples of Christ not Christians, as they don’t confess creeds or have creedal tests of faith? Baptists? Quakers? Pentecostals? You’re excluding an awful lot of people.
And by the way, the radical reformation is what gives you permission to argue that you are a Christian, and the reformers were called non-Christians by many in their day. A Christianity which allows no room for doctrinal disagreement, calling dissenters non-Christians, is nothing like what Jesus taught. That’s why I left the church.
The Christianity for which you argue would never allow a Luther to rise in its midst. Any reform is squashed by creedal tests. Only those who think alike, who agree absolutely on Jesus’ metaphysical role, are allowed into the circle. It’s a very rigid, exclusionary faith.
I am not going to agree with Andy, that would simply be to far out of my comfort zone, but I am also not going to agree with Jeremy on this note of contention.
My take is this; Spong clearly disagrees with most any form of what people would call mainstream, or orthodox, or fundamental Christianity in a way that causes me to want to beat my head against something hard, but is it possible he is sincere in his belief and feels he can do the most good for his people by sharing with them the beliefs he feels are closest to accurate.
I am in no way agreeing with the guy, I just know from personal experience when you buck a trend within the established group you are a part of it is not necessarily to undermine the system, you just feels you might be right and your views are worth sharing.
Posterity generally looks at ecclesiastical envelope pushers in a positive light anyway. Jesus was really an envelope pusher as well a many of the pioneers over the centuries. Their peers call the heretics and posterity calls them Heroes, that historically has been a trend.
Again I am not agreeing with this crackpot – I think he is cuckoo for cocoa puffs, but I don’t want to prejudge the fact that he is undermining while collecting a check, when he might actually feel he is doing what he is supposed to do by voicing his views to the people he feels called to lead.
I think I might be going to Hell for writing this response so could someone say a few Hail Mary’s for me.
Hi
You call Spong a heretic. He was a church official. Thus he must have been de-frocked / de-fellowshipped, or whatever his denomination calls disowning a member.
Please provide information about this action by church officials against Spong. If no such action was taken, what does it mean to say he was a heretic?
Thanks
Heretic means ‘one who chooses,’ in this case religious belief, as over against orthodox, which means ‘right thinking.’ So, the orthodox, by definition, are those who ascribe to a system which has been decided by the orthodox is ‘right,’ while heretics, ‘choosers,’ feel free to choose their beliefs. Both traditions have been alive throughout the history of christianity.
Spong was never defrocked.
Richie: You came dangerously close to agreeing with me. I was scared for a minute. You are definitely going to hell now.
You call Spong a heretic. Could it be the other way around? Jesus Christ was called a heretic when he talked about things that went against popular belief. I tried to widen my thinking parameters and I could understand everything that Bishop Spong is saying. He has enlightened me on a lot of issues and he has deepened my Christian experience. There is more to God than what we have been taught to believe until now. I really thank Bishop Spong for sharing his thoughts and beliefs.
Hi Andy. Hope you don’t mind my input on this old post. I was doing some research on Jack Spong on the internet and your blog came up. After reading your OP, I wanted to offer a couple of comments.
In the first place, it is the church and the world that constantly debate over who or what is a Christian and who or what is not. Jesus himself never said one word about being a Christian or Christianity. And when he did talk about what it meant to be one of his followers, his criteria seemed to be much more based upon works and lifestyle than upon specific beliefs or doctrines. So, on a certain level, whether one is a Christian or not is irrelevant. Following Jesus seems to be more about character than about dogma.
Secondly, even self-professing Christians don’t follow all the teachings of Jesus, despite Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 28 that his disciples should be taught to obey everything he had said. For instance, Christians don’t hate father and mother, sell everything they have and give the money to the poor, leave their families, heal the sick, raise the dead, or do greater things than Jesus himself did. So it is odd that “Bible believers” who insist that they know exactly what the qualifications are for being a Christian and what the rules are for Christian living can condemn homosexuality (which Jesus never talked about) while ignoring Jesus’ teachings themselves.
I think that the truth of the matter is that when it comes to religion or Christianity, we all cherry-pick which parts of our religion we are going to incorporate into our worldview. COnservatives do it. Liberals do it (they ignor Jesus’ teachings on hell, for instance). As a child, I was taught to eat everything on my plate. As an adult, I have the freedom and the responsibility to be more discerning.
Jack gives good reasons for why, despite his heresy, he still considers himself to be a Christian. That’s his choice. I like and incorporate alot of Jesus’ teachings into my own life, but I no longer call myself a Christian because 1) Jesus never talked about it 2) there is no standard definition and 3) I think the label is ultimately meaningless if there is no change in character. From everything I’ve read and heard of Spong, he is a good man, a man of good character who genuinely loves people, even those who would call him a heretic. I could care less what people call him (or what they call me). If Jesus was anywhere right, it is the heart that matters.
I’ve spoken to Bishop Spong at length on the phone for a profile I wrote of him. He is someone who I greatly admire. He is simply a wonderful person — passionate, courageous, gracious and fascinating. If Jesus were to return, I’m confident he’d like him and approve of him too.
I comment from the “Far Side Of Eighty” having celebrated my eightieth birthday this year by walking the last 100 miles of El Camino de Santiago as a pilgrim.
With that as background, let me say that I find Bishop Spong a refreshing presence in my Christian experience. There are divisions in the Christian Church such as I have not experienced in my lifetime. Believers such as John Spong, Thomas Merton, and C;larence Jordon offer hope that strong individuals can bring divided Christians together under one creative power whom I hope all men of good will shall acknowledge before I climb my last hill.