© Roger M Tagg 2010-2011
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This is the first book following Spong's retirement as a US Anglican bishop. Despite being a committed churchman and a knowledgeable biblical scholar, he has come to the conclusion that he can no longer pussy-foot with his opinions for fear of causing controversy. He is strongly of the view that the traditional "supernatural magician" view of God is not only no longer in tune with our times, but is also dangerous. This is not a new view (see the introduction quotes below). People like Tillich, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer and John Robinson have all said similar things.
After I had moved on from Cambridge and involvement in its active Methodist Society in the early 1960s, I too found the traditional supernatural and mythological line something I could no longer accept, and I read Robinson's Honest to God, as well as Bonhoeffer and the others, with interest. The Hinde Street chapel (in London W1, and servicing many London University people) offered an "Encounter Group" for doubters like myself, led by the minister at the time, the late Brian Duckworth. In the 1970s, more than two years of working in Moslem countries also made me more aware that revelation of the Good was not the monopoly of Christianity; I felt that the people I met in those countries were just as good as those I knew in the UK.
I have followed Spong's writings in more recent times, and attended a talk he gave when he visited my then home town of Palmerston North in New Zealand (mid to late 1990s). There was a big attendance and an overflow tent with CCTV had to be erected. What surprises me somewhat is that there hasn't subsequently been more action, either to start a chain of "new faith communities" or to answer Spong's points systematically and justify the traditional line. Instead we have seen a rise in emotion-charged fundamentalism (in Christianity as well as in Islam), and the only churches growing are those with charismatic and/or strong literal scripture-believing styles.
Criticism of the established churches (e.g. RC and Anglican) at the time of writing (2010) seems to be more in terms of sensation-stirring by the media about past child molestation by priests. I fear this is missing the more important issue.
I think perhaps that the big inhibitor to success of a post-theistic version of Christianity is the antipathy by a large majority in the West to the idea of thinking seriously about life. There is at present an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism; people seem to be scared of being thought of as eggheads or geeks. It could also be that the immediate struggles of an increasingly complex life are taking up too much of our waking hours, leaving us with no time for reflection. People also seem to find comfort in pre-packaged opinions, e.g. those of social circles, political parties, gangs or "tribes", or of views expressed in the media, particularly on TV - not to mention fiction writers (remember the Da Vinci Code?), politicians and religious leaders.
Australian TV, over Easter 2010, aired a programme purporting to debunk scientific tests on the Turin Shroud. Apparently several different hypotheses, and part of the evidence, were left out, leaving a somewhat biased viewpoint, but one that might appeal to traditional religionists. Clearly many people prefer a good fiction - especially if it involves some element of mysticism, magic, ghosts, astrology, spiritualism, or any old mumbo jumbo - than serious, possibly boring, fact. I guess Spong would say that religion is just another business cashing in on this human need.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | ix | Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis): God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us to help us. |
| x | Spong's mentor was JAT Robinson (Bishop of Woolwich in the late 1960s). Both aimed to bridge the gap between the Christian academy and the person in the pew. | |
| xi a | Bultmann (German theologian) first proposed de-mythologizing religion; Bonhoeffer, Christianity without religion; Tillich (existentialist philosopher), God not as a being but the ground of all being. | |
| xi b | Following Robinson's publication of Honest to God, the C of E attacked the messenger, preferring "the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), whatever that faith was - and certainly, it couldn't be complete. | |
| xiii | Letters Spong received after his earlier Why Christianity must Change or Die were 3 to 1 in favour; before that, they had mostly been negative. | |
| xiv | 90% of the letters were from lay people, most of whom were either just hanging in or had dropped out. They included many from the Deep South and Mid West (of the USA). | |
| xv | The vast majority of negative mail was from clergy, and was vehement and frantic. | |
| xviii | The motto of his seminary was "seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will". | |
| xix | What does God look like beyond a dying theism? Does such a God matter? Who is the Christ when incarnation, atonement and the Trinity are no longer usable? | |
| xx | This book is based on lectures at Harvard in 2000, when he was a visiting lecturer. | |
| xxi a | "I am now convinced that no human system, including Christianity itself, can maintain the exclusive power claims of the past. That is 'tribal religion'." | |
| xxi b | "The religious promise to provide security, that enables one to cope with life's intransigence, is an illusion designed to keep human beings dependent and child-like." | |
| 1 - | 2 | Spong finds the "5 fundamentals" not just naďve, but eminently rejectable: 1) scripture as the literal word of God; 2) virgin birth as the literal means by which the divinity of Christ is guaranteed; 3) the view of atonement as a parallel to sacrificing a lamb; 4) physical resurrection; and 5) a second coming of Jesus at the Day of Judgment, with allocation to Heaven and Hell depending on the record of our life. |
| 3 | Spong counts himself as a Christian, but doesn't regard God as a supernatural being, and certainly not someone capable of intervening. | |
| 4 | He doesn't believe in any miracles, Old or New Testament, nor in many of the "historical" stories. | |
| 5a | Stories of a physical resurrection only appear in the later gospels, not in Mark or Q. | |
| 5b | Jesus didn't found any church or create sacraments. These are just seizing and maintenance of power by men's organizations. | |
| 5c | Nor did he refer to the Fall; that's another device to support institutional power. | |
| 5d | He doesn't want to belong to any church that deems women incapable of any role in it. | |
| 6a | Same for homosexuals (they are just a natural minority, like left-handed people); and the same goes for race. | |
| 6b | He also doesn't like "tablets of stone" ethics that apply for all time and in all situations, nor talk of the "word of God". | |
| 9a | He regards as "tribal" the intervening theistic type of God (e.g. plagues in Egypt, Red Sea crossing, or stopping the movement of the sun to enable Joshua to slaughter the Amorites). | |
| 9b | The Roman Catholic church eventually got round to sort of apologizing for their treatment of Galileo, but not of the many others who spoke the truth that they burnt as heretics. | |
| 10-11 | Liturgies are largely borrowed from older religions, e.g. sacrifices. | |
| 12-13 | "Christian", as used in common speech, has come to mean narrow authoritarian, anti homosexual and abortion. | |
| 13 | Anti-abortion and anti birth control people don't want to remove guilt and punishment for enjoying sex; they want to keep it as one of their holds against people enjoying themselves. Spong thinks abortion should be safe, legal and rare. | |
| 14 | Spong's books and words are not really aimed at conservative and fundamentalist believers ... | |
| 15 | ... nor at those who have written off religion totally for the secular world. | |
| 17 | Instead, he speaks to those, maybe a minority, who still have some God-consciousness, either just within or just outside some church. | |
| 18 | His big concern is whether a replacement to theistic religion will keep any continuity with the old Christianity. | |
| 19 | He feels he needs to strip away every attempt to literalize the interpretive myths and explanatory legends of the past. | |
| 2 - | 22 | The theistic God was the prime mover in health, weather, winning wars etc; if things didn't go to your liking then this was your punishment, and you must have sinned. But modern medicine is just as effective on sinners, and wars are won by big arsenals, not by the just few. |
| 24 | Non-theism gets mistakenly taken for atheism, and hence triggers fundamentalist reactions. | |
| 25-8 | Using God to help control anxiety isn't coping with the increased trauma and hysteria we have these days. We have turned to caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, anti-depressants and sedatives, despite their side effects. | |
| 28 | "The peace of God that passeth Prozac". Spong comments on the rise in the number of suicide attempts. Darwin, Australia is quoted as a particularly bad place. | |
| 29 | Similar remarks apply to school shootings; these are often tied in with Nazi ideas. | |
| 30 | Conservatives think that a return to prayers and corporal punishment is the answer. | |
| 32 | Revulsion at the Holocaust didn't prevent ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda etc. The bulwark against hysteria is disappearing. | |
| 33 | Apart from retreats into fundamentalism, others have pursued New Age and oriental mysticism. | |
| 35 | Theistic devices have lost their hold. | |
| 3 - | 37 | The chapter starts with an interesting bit of a poem by Thomas Hardy about how we have imagined God over history. |
| 38 | What separates homo sapiens is the capacity to be fully self-conscious, which means we have anxiety. (RT: does this require language?) Animals don't need tranquilizers, but we need some sort of fix. | |
| 43 | We often cope with the help of communal life (RT: as do some animals too). | |
| 44 | We need a modus operandi that takes other personal beings into account. | |
| 45 | God (theist) is a human construct created by frightened self-aware humans. | |
| 47 | People talk about "father sky" and "mother earth". | |
| 51 | In our hymns and prayers we grovel as if a slave to a master. | |
| 52 | Circular creation of "certainty", which includes the tenet that our sect is right, and the others wrong. | |
| 4 - | 71 | Alternative views: God is love ... |
| 73 | ... and God as the Ground of All Being. | |
| 74 | Radical insecurity is the very mark of our humanity - so we should expect to live with it. | |
| 76 | Tillich: "live out the courage to be". (RT: surely that's existentialism?) | |
| 5 - | 79 | Robert Funk: "we have been betrayed (= misled?) by the Bible. |
| 91 | There is no miraculous birth in Mark; he had clearly never heard of it, and he didn't think it necessary to invent it. | |
| 95 | The earliest witnesses (Paul, Q, Thomas, Mark) "portray a Jesus not yet squeezed into a theistic mould". Mark also concludes with the crucifixion. | |
| 6 - | 97 on | This chapter covers the view held by several bible scholars that theism was "written in" to the later gospels, the last of which (John) is dated about 90 AD. |
| 7 - | 117 | Some of the history in the Bible is inconsistent. Herod the Great died in 4 BC. Quirinius wasn't governor of Syria until 6-7 AD. Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem according to Matthew. |
| 118-21 | Virgin birth has been shown by genetics to be absurd, and Ascension is similarly impossible and coloured by a "God in the sky" image. Allusions to the Fall and Atonement were added later, which negates the supposed justification for certain sacraments. | |
| 8 - | 129 on | Jesus is still good and worth following, without all the theism. |
| 136 | Jesus never said a word in any gospel about homosexuality. | |
| 137 | Jesus didn't rule out lepers, adulterous women, tax collectors, Samaritans. God cannot be bound by the limits of our religious systems, or by human-devised creeds. God exists in Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Krishna - and in Baha'ism ... and many others (nominees on p 145). | |
| 9 - Evil | 151 | The opposite to humanism, according to Spong's critics, is supernaturalism. |
| 153a | Incompleteness, or inadequacy, is not the same as evil. | |
| 153b | Maybe evil is the cruelty that comes of the competitiveness in the game of life. | |
| 154 | Some of this is natural, but where it gets nasty is where tribalism rears its head. | |
| 155 | The individuals who carry out the evil are, in fact, incomplete - or they would refuse to carry it out. | |
| 156 | Many of the evil practices are considered OK in tribal situations. | |
| 157 | The evil of the "mob spirit". | |
| 158 | Various psychoses, including sadism, are triggered by some form of incompleteness (which may be genetic or conditioned). | |
| 161 | Some "evildoers" disconnect with reality (!), preferring some unreality. | |
| 162 | There are many examples of distorted lives, which cause most evil if they gain power. | |
| 164 | What about the evils of disease, and addiction? | |
| 165 | Most apparently evil people probably don't intend evil; they get into the throes of some evil power. | |
| 166 | We all carry a "shadow" around with us (RT: a Mr Hyde). | |
| My comment: There doesn't seem to be any mention of "personal responsibility" here. | ||
| 10 - | 171a | Renan: "A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of the past and a hatred of their neighbours". |
| Evangelism | 171b | The primary political purpose of claims made in the name of a deity is to enable a particular institution to assert that it alone possesses the truth, and to suggest that those who are not part of that particular community of faith are lost in the darkness of their own errors. |
| 172a | This creates pressure for conversion by offering converts the reward of a salvation that is not available to anyone who is not a "true believer" or part of the "true church". It makes it clear to all who is "in" and who is "out". | |
| 172b | It produces a mentality that tends to focus the message of the institution's belief system until it reaches a white-hot intensity. | |
| 172c | These exclusive claims for "my God and my tradition" have marked every expansionist and missionary religious system throughout the world. | |
| 177a | The Dutch Reformed Church supported apartheid in South Africa. | |
| 177b | The Christian goal of converting the world to Christ has been a significant failure. | |
| 178 | Colonial-era missionary activities were often evil. | |
| 181a | We should move beyond our scriptures, creeds, liturgies, hymns and traditional devotions, regarding each as corresponding to a particular time and place. | |
| 181b | Divisions in Christianity in Europe reflect political, geographical and life-outlook differences, i.e. different "filters". | |
| 182 | Hopefully, other religions will do the same (eventually?). | |
| 183 | Matthew Fox's "God is like groundwater" analogy - easier to understand than "ground of our being"? | |
| 11 - Prayer | 185 | RS Thomas poem - shows a change to a post-theistic view of prayer. |
| 187-8 | Cop-outs when prayer doesn't work: "thy will be done", "why me?" (may lead to blasphemy if we blame God for not answering), "God's plan will surely be revealed" | |
| 190 | Prayer: to whom? Traditionally, it's to a sort of up-market Santa Claus. | |
| 191 | Traditional prayer perpetuates the illusion of theism. | |
| 192 | Bad things happen - even to good people. But people seem to use theism as a security blanket. | |
| 193a | Instead, we should do meditation and contemplation. | |
| 193b | The new humanity is going beyond the concern with personal survival. | |
| 193c | When we offer ourselves to others, we experience no diminution of our selfhood; we become an expander of the spirit of love. | |
| 194 | Why do we seem to always require some personal payoff? | |
| 199 | Spong goes for a reserved time early in the morning. | |
| 12 - | 201 | What is the future of "the church"? |
| 204a | Liturgical words are really just poetry. | |
| 204b | Spong refuses to say some prayers and sing some hymns, ones which contain inappropriate ideas. | |
| 204c | We have schizophrenia brought about by our love of the familiar and nostalgic. (RT: A New Zealand Chinese society, at a social we went to, liked to sing the old Maoist songs, even after they had given that all up.) | |
| 206a | Many people like to listen to demagogues (RT: e.g. TV evangelists, Hitler). | |
| 206b | We probably need to call the church by some other name. Spong likes "ecclesia". | |
| 207a | We shouldn't just go back to Abraham (RT: or Adam?), we should go back to the origins of life. | |
| 207b | We should honour the human gift of self-consciousness. | |
| 208 | The ecclesia should discuss tribal behaviour, the environment, and the rich-poor divide. | |
| 209 | It should celebrate rites of passage (birth, coming of age, marriage, death) and the seasons of the year. | |
| 210a | But marriage should not be regarded as a "compromise with sin". | |
| 210b | Stories of Christ are fine, without the theism. | |
| 213 | Guilt will no longer be a weapon of control and oppression. | |
| 214 | The ecclesia should be a "centre for caring". | |
| 215a | It should recognize redundancy, misfortune, adoption (RT: and abortion). | |
| 215b | The ecclesia will still need trained leaders (RT: but the training need will be different from today's seminaries). | |
| 13 - So what? | 222 | The RC church has failed to apologize for executing Giordano Bruno - and many others - for speaking the truth. |
| 223a | David Friedrich Strauss was not actually killed, but was banned and reduced to poverty, for expressing views now not considered particularly dangerous. | |
| 223b | So it all certainly matters to some people. | |
| 224 | Crossan's test questions, e.g. "is Christianity more like politics or more like sex?" reveal some interesting attitudes. | |
| 225 | The Vatican recently issued a strong anti-ecumenical document (saying RC is the only way to God). (RT: but that was under the previous reactionary pope.) | |
| 228 | The "Ecclesia" might not be seen to matter, unless it adopts a strong action-group style. | |
| 14 - | 234 | Katie Ford's "rising flood" analogy. People rationally knew they had to leave, but emotionally they were immobilized. (RT: in Australia, bush fires were similar - and now, in 2011, floods.) |
| 235 | Creeds are border makers. There's no mention of "love" or "other people" in any of them. | |
| 239 | We must leave the God of miracle and magic, and also the excessive claims of being the recipient of an unchallengeable revelation. We should never call other pathways (Christian, Moslem, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist etc) false. | |
| 240 | Many people will be gripped by the fear of moral anarchy. What is sin is those actions that diminish the being of another. | |
| 245 | The critical success factor of a new Christianity is probably a chain of "new faith communities". |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 13th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .