Unbelievable

John Shelby Spong

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062641342
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses ushered in the Reformation, bestselling author and controversial bishop and teacher John Shelby Spong delivers twelve forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Christianity was in crisis—a state of conflict that gave birth to the Reformation in 1517. Enduring for more than 200 years, Luther's movement was then followed by a "revolutionary time of human knowledge." Yet these advances in our thinking had little impact on Christians' adherence to doctrine—which has led the faith to a critical point once again.

Bible scholar and Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong contends that there is mounting pressure among Christians for a radically new kind of Christianity—a faith deeply connected to the human experience instead of outdated dogma. To keep Christianity vital, he urges modern Christians to update their faith in light of these advances in our knowledge, and to challenge the rigid and problematic Church teachings that emerged with the Reformation. There is a disconnect, he argues, between the language of traditional worship and the language of the twenty-first century. Bridging this divide requires us to rethink and reformulate our basic understanding of God.

With its revolutionary resistance to the authority of the Church in the sixteenth century, Spong sees in Luther's movement a model for today's discontented Christians. In fact, the questions they raise resonate with those contemplated by our ancestors. Does the idea of God still have meaning? Can we still follow historic creeds with integrity? Are not such claims as an infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible ridiculous in today's world?

In Unbelievable, Spong outlines twelve "theses" to help today's believers more deeply contemplate and reshape their faith. As an educator, clergyman, and writer who has devoted his life to his faith, Spong has enlightened Christians and challenged them to explore their beliefs in new and meaningful ways. In this, his final book, he continues that rigorous tradition, once again offering a revisionist approach that strengthens Christianity and secures its relevance for generations to come.

Part I

Setting the Stage

1

Why Modern Men and Women Can No Longer Be Believers

It was my daughter Jaquelin Ketner Spong, the recipient of a Ph.D. degree in physics from Stanford University, who once said to me: “Dad, the questions the church keeps trying to answer, we don’t even ask anymore.” I was quite startled, for it painted a picture of the irrelevance of religion that was profound. Could the enterprise to whose institutional expressions I had dedicated my entire professional life really be this out of touch? Could it ever again be a force possessing the ability to shape the life of the world? Could the system of thought that had for centuries dominated Western understanding and the Western world finally be at the end of its life? These were troubling questions.

Theology was once called the “queen of the sciences,” and it garnered enormous respect in the great academies of learning, but now it appears no longer to be able to attract the brightest and best into its ranks. Indeed, one must almost apologize for spending one’s time in this academic arena. This is not a new phenomenon. When I was an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina in the early 1950s, my faculty advisor, Dr. Louis Katsoff, who was also head of the Department of Philosophy, asked on our initial interview why I wanted to major in philosophy. “Because I want to be a priest in my church,” I replied. I had come out of a culture in the South where such a vocation still carried a great amount of cachet. Dr. Katsoff punctured that assumption quite quickly. “Why do you want to spend your life dealing with a medieval superstition?” he asked. For my entire career in that department I constantly had to defend and to justify my choice. There was, however, still enough of a religious veneer in our society that I could proceed with my chosen profession.

When finally armed with my undergraduate degree in philosophy, with substantial work in the life sciences, which particularly attracted me, and with my master’s degree in divinity from the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Virginia, I began my career as the rector of St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, located right off the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. My 11:00 A.M. congregation was made up primarily of married graduate students from Duke in various fields, but medicine and chemistry stand out in my memory as dominant, supplemented by undergraduates, who were mostly female students. This imbalance was caused by the fact that the church was next door to East Campus, where female students were housed, and not because of a sexist bias.

Sunday after Sunday in that church I had to deal with how traditional Christianity, which I represented, interacted or failed to interact with brilliant, educated graduate and undergraduate university students. One learns quickly in such an environment that claims for the “authority of the Bible”—filled, as that book is, with stories of an invasive, supernatural deity performing miracles—are ignored, and all attempts to define “the true faith,” or to pronounce anything that deviates from a traditional understanding to be “heresy,” is more a conversation-stopper than it is a way to dialogue. I also learned in that church and from that congregation that there was, and I suspect continues to be, a yearning for a meaningful religious experience or, at least, a way to have one’s life enhanced by something beyond itself. The desire to believe in this something or to feel oneself to be embraced by a sense of transcendent wonder appears to be well-nigh universal. On this frontier that seems to exist between contemporary knowledge and religious yearning, I was destined to spend most of my ordained life. I kept recalling the words of the seventeenth-century French philosopher and theologian Blaise Pascal, who wrote: “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.”^*

Even now, looking back on my career, there is no doubt that I had times of success working on this frontier. Surprisingly enough, I lived out my life as a priest not in what might be thought of as liberal parts of either my nation or my church, but in the most traditionally conservative parts. My first congregation, just off the campus of Duke, grew while I was there with a significant surge of new members. I called them the “converts.” They came primarily from small-town, fundamentalist religious backgrounds, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. When their religious training collided with the thought that bombarded them from this great university, they abandoned fundamentalism in droves. I appeared to offer them a way to continue to be believers that they had not known before. That pattern continued in my other priestly assignments, all of which were in traditional parts of the United States. I served a church in the agricultural belt of eastern North Carolina, in Tarboro. Then I moved to the small city of Lynchburg, which was thought of as the northern edge of “conservative Southside Virginia.” Next I became rector of a church in the heart of Richmond, Virginia, that called itself “the Cathedral of the Confederacy.” During the American Civil War both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis were regular worshippers. In all of these congregations my appeal was to those who had either abandoned the religion of their childhood as no longer relevant to the life they were living, or, at the very least, packed their religious upbringing into a compartment of their lives, where knowledge or new insight would never be allowed to challenge it. The success I enjoyed in each of those places led me into the delusion that I had discovered the doorway into a new Christian future.

That all changed in 1976 when I was elected the bishop of the Diocese of Newark, an area that encompasses the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, with its incredible diversity. A brand-new perspective on ministry was forced into my awareness.

I learned, first, that a bishop exercises little leadership over local congregations. His or her influence is guided mostly by example over a long period of time. Most local congregations dance to the tune of their established membership, and in most cases the personal security of that membership is bound up with what they might call the “faith of our fathers.”^* (I am sure they also meant “mothers,” but that was not always either obvious or emotionally accurate.) I also learned that most clergy are either unable or unwilling to engage the great theological issues of the day because of their perception that to do so will “disturb the faith and beliefs” of their people. Indeed, that was the reaction that my initial theological reflections as bishop prompted.

The first hint I had of this reaction came very shortly after my election, before the glow of pride had been allowed to be enjoyed for more than a day. Election as a bishop is followed, in the Episcopal Church, by a confirmation process. During this time what I believed was to be examined deeply. I had already written three books. My thoughts were out there, in the public arena. The first book, entitled Honest Prayer,^* challenged the presuppositions behind the traditional activity we call prayer. The second was This Hebrew Lord,^* which challenged some of the traditional theological assumptions that have been built up through the centuries in regard to the central symbol of the Christian story, Jesus of Nazareth. Doctrines such as the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity that once had made contact with the thought forms of their day were, I suggested, no longer registering with this generation. There was nothing in either book that had not been discussed openly in my theological training. This was my first awareness of the gap between the academy and the pew, to say nothing of the gap in honesty between what clergy both knew and believed and what they were willing to say. There is a game being played in contemporary church life where truth is suppressed in the name of unity.

The third book was entitled Dialogue in Search of Jewish-Christian Understanding.^* It was co-authored with a brilliant rabbi named Jack Daniel Spiro. He had read my book This Hebrew Lord and had challenged me to a series of dialogues in which the members of my congregation would be forced to engage their stereotypical prejudices about Jews and the members of his congregation would be forced to engage their stereotypical prejudices about Christians. When one steps outside the circle of one’s own religious history to engage another’s religious history, the pious religious clichés of the past simply do not work. How can we present the typical Christian claim that Jesus is “God’s only son” to a congregation of Jews who believe that God is so awesomely one and holy that to suggest that God had a son seems like blasphemy?

This dialogue lifted me into a new level of notoriety; it was covered by local radio, television and the print media, but it then became a national story, at least in religious circles, coming into the awareness of the increasingly non-religious population and even the thoroughly secular population through the Washington Post. My attempts to speak to a non-traditionally religious body of people was seized upon or attacked by church representatives who were not sure they wanted someone who violated traditional boundaries to serve as one of their bishops. Apparently my positions, all of which were widely taught and understood by the theological seminaries—including the one that had trained me for ordination—had challenged, frightened and threatened the religious world.

I also noticed in this struggle that while the attacks on my faith from my religious critics gained a good bit of public notice, in secular society the matter was regarded as little more than a dispute within the sphere of the religious world. It certainly did not create a desire for anyone to look again at the faith system from which they had significantly moved away. My critics could not see that the faith they wanted to define in the most traditional forms appealed not at all to those who had left organized religion and who had no desire to return to its antiquated forms of worship. So out of touch with reality were these traditionalists that they really did believe that if they kept Christianity inside its recognizable framework of creedal beliefs, someday “the lost sheep” would find their way back into the fold. To confirm a bishop who did not guard that tradition meant that the fox of secularity had entered the hen house of the church! Only disaster could result. So in their minds I was the heretic who could not be allowed entrance to a position of authority.

My opposition was led by ultra-conservative church publications whose titles betrayed their position. The Living Church and The Certain Trumpet were two of them.^* I was shocked by this experience and for the first time disillusioned at what seemed to me to be a bleak Christian future.

Controversy in the Christian church is seldom just about biblical exegesis and theological formulations. By and large people do not want to engage these issues publicly, perhaps because they know deep down that their religious convictions cannot stand much public scrutiny. So most church fights and even divisions are on social issues such as racial prejudice, equality for women or members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, or issues of human sexuality like birth control, abortion and the ordination of women to be priests and bishops. Those issues, in which the church has little expertise, have split the “body of Christ” into competing splinter groups, rival hierarchies and mutually exclusive claims to be “the true church.”

So while my confirmation seemed to be based on “heretical claims” found in those first three books of my writing career, the meaning that gave it passion was my participation in the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation and ordination movement and the gay rights movement. These were surely in the background, but the fact that I was not a “true believer” in the formulas of the past became visible for the first time. Had I not been elected bishop, my theology would have remained hidden.

Far more than these critics in the church recognized, however, these theological issues had been bubbling beneath the surface, waiting for an opportunity to erupt publicly. My election as a bishop provided just such an opportunity. The issues, though, were not new; they had simply been repressed. Friedrich Nietzsche had declared in the nineteenth century that God is dead. Few people paid much attention to Nietzsche, however, who was widely regarded as a madman. In 1960 a group of theologians emerged in the United States who called themselves the “God is dead theologians.”^* They achieved a certain amount of notoriety, being featured in the cover story in TIME magazine on April 8, 1966. In the larger Anglican family that housed my Episcopal Church there were two sitting bishops who stirred these waters. In England John A. T. Robinson broke out of the pack with a book published in 1963 entitled Honest to God,^* which touched a nerve in the English population, becoming hotly debated first in the English papers, then in the world press and finally entering into conversations in the pubs and among the cabbies of the nation. Generally the world devoured Bishop Robinson’s thought, while the established church resisted it. In the United States it was a bishop named James Albert Pike whose books A Time for Christian Candor and If This Be Heresy^* also broke out of the boundaries of the church to be read by a critical-thinking world, while generally being criticized and reviled by the church hierarchy.

By and large, what the world relished, the church abhorred. John Robinson, in that exquisitely understated English manner, was marginalized by the Church of England. He was left to wallow in the rather secondary role of an area bishop and was never allowed to head up a major diocese. He finally resigned from the bishop’s office and went back to his career as an academic. In the United States traditional voices, led by the bishop of South Florida, Henry I. Louttit, Sr., constantly threatened Bishop Pike with a heresy trial, which was averted ultimately by Bishop Pike’s resignation and his move into a think tank. Robinson and Pike were not the only ones who were battling on this frontier, but they were the major ones in the struggle for relevance.

In Roman Catholicism that church’s most brilliant ordained scholars, who dared to move beyond the defined boundaries of “orthodoxy,” were harassed, silenced, removed and marginalized. One thinks of Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Küng, Matthew Fox, Leonardo Boff and Charles Curran. Lay Roman Catholic scholars, especially female Roman Catholic scholars, could get away with a great deal more—and they did. They were simply ignored or were denied the privilege of speaking at or teaching in Roman Catholic schools. Joseph Ratzinger, first as the cardinal inquisitor and later as Pope Benedict XVI, led this attempt at suppression.

Observing these events in church life was a little like watching Humpty Dumpty being lived out in history. The theological consensus of the past was being broken into thousands of pieces, and “all the church’s horses and all the church’s men” could not put it back together again!

At first the response of institutional Christianity was to seek a renaissance in security-offering churches, where the old-time religion was offered, together with modern music and charismatic, show-boating evangelicals who had more volume than conviction and were content to say to people: “You do not have to think about these things; you only have to trust and obey.” The just-under-the-surface crisis in faith would soon go away, they assured their increasingly large audiences. That movement has, however, proved not to be the wave of the future. The great expansion of evangelical religion, with its rise of mega-churches, has now crested and has actually begun its inevitable retreat. The second generation of evangelical leaders has not been as compelling as the first. Some of those churches have morphed into feel-good places that avoid controversy and critical thought to concentrate on easing their people’s way through life. The biggest sign of the demise of organized religion in our generation, however, has been the statistical downward spiral of mainline churches, most of which know too much to play the security games of their past, but which have not yet figured out wha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Setting the Stage
• Part 2: Stating the Problem
• Part 3: Thesis 1: God
• Part 4: Thesis 2: Jesus the Christ
• Part 5: Thesis 3: Original Sin
• Part 6: Thesis 4: The Virgin Birth
• Part 7: Thesis 5: Miracles
• Part 8: Thesis 6: Atonement Theology
• Part 9: Thesis 7: Easter
• Part 10: Thesis 8: The Ascension
• Part 11: Thesis 9: Ethics
• Part 12: Thesis 10: Prayer
• Part 13: Thesis 11: Life After Death
• Part 14: Thesis 12: Universalism
• Part 15: Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• About the Author
• Also by John Shelby Spong
• Copyright
• About the Publisher