New Reformation: Spong's 12 Theses

[spiritually inclined]

I've posted this elsewhere but decided it belongs in the Liberal Christian forums, too. What do you liberal Christians think of Spong's theses?

John Shelby Spong is one of the most liberal theologians in the Anglican Communion and Christian religion. He calls for a reformation that will make the last one appear insignificant in comparison. His 12 theses are as follows:

Quote:
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
As a Christian, how do you react to Spong's call for a new reformation?

James

 

[Jordan St. Francis]

I don't consider Spong a liberal. I don't know what to consider him at all, frankly.

His first thesis automatically ex-communicates himself from any kind of legitimate visible communion with the Church of Christ. There is very little need to proceed to his next 11 points.

If he does not believe in God, on what basis can he possibly be a Christian? I am not a liberal, but am I the only one who thinks it ridiculous he persists under the title of bishop, shepherd of the Christian faithful?

How can you, in about 11 points, rip the spine out of a religion and call it "reform" ?

Spong would probably make a good Buddhist or secular humanist. What he is saying is not new and its not something Christians have ever said.

Point 12 is noble.

 

[sandandfoam]

Point by point:-
1.I'd like to know why he says Theism is dead.
2. Depends on 1
3. I think the Bible is mythology, I don't see what he hopes to gain by calling it nonsense.
4. I don't take it literally anyway so have no trouble with that view.
5. As above
6. " "
7. That's my view too.
8. The story is a story, so?
9. Agreed
10.I don't see why not, whether they'll be answered is a different question.
11.Agreed. I would also say that the Church is not the repository of ultimate truth, individual experience is superior.
12. Agreed, God is inside.

 

[doppelganger]

I'd like to know why he says Theism is dead.

Read any of the three books: "Why Christianity Must Change or Die", "A New Christianity For A New World" or "Jesus For the Non-Religious" for some excellent insights on this. I've been a Spong fan for several years now.

He's an apostle to the non-religious much in the same way Paul was an apostle to the "gentiles." I doubt he or people to whom his approach and writings appeal care whether traditional "Christians" approve of the way they understand Christianity. That's the whole point of a reformation after all, isn't it?

 

[lunamoth]

I'd like to know why he says Theism is dead.

I think he means anthropomorphic, Great-beard-in-the-sky theism is dead.

 

[doppelganger]

I think he means anthropomorphic, Great-beard-in-the-sky theism is dead.

I agree . . . kinda. He takes the position that "belief in the existence of God" as a discreet thing or being is no longer comprehensible or meaningful to most people and instead that a re-opening of the divine experience from which "God" notions arise is where the future of human spirituality (and perhaps its past) really lies. Not unlike what Dawkins and Dennett have pointed out, people don't really believe in God much anyway - they believe in certain words or ideas about "God" (or as Dennett would put it, they "believe in belief in God").

From Spong's " . . . Change or Die":

It becomes so clear that the God most of us have worshiped during human history has looked and acted in a very human manner. In view of this fact, my first discovery in the exile is that I can no longer approach this subject by asking, "Who is God?" Nor can I be limited to personal images for God. The "who" question and the personal images of God slide quickly together, and theology becomes an exercise not unlike staring into a mirror. The fact is that the God of Thomas Aquinas looked and acted very much like Thomas Aquinas. So, too, did the God of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Thomas Cranmer look and act like each of these theologians. Definitions of God that are personal or that come as responses to the question "who?" are therefore quite dangerous. Some would say they are also increasingly quite inadequate. Hence, in my search for a new way to speak about God in the exile, I have come to see that I must abandon both personal images and "who?" questions and seek a different starting place.

But to reach this conclusion means that I must be prepared to dismiss most of the God content of the ages. That is what Michael Goulder did. If there is no other way to speak of God, then his path might have to become the path for all of us. For that reason, the enormity of that dismissal becomes a step not taken lightly. It is in recognizing exile, however, that we see the traditional pathway to God to be no longer open to us. Exile people know that there can be no return to the past, so they must be prepared either to give up or to look in some other direction. If exile from all religious systems is not our final destination, then only one alternative is open to us, and that is to go forward into we know not what. That is where the talk of God must now be located. The future may contain no answer either, but we do not know that yet. We do know, however, that the answer surely is not contained in the theistic God concept of yesterday. The believer in exile bets his or her faith on the possibility of a new insight emerging out of a new direction.

And from "New Christianity":

It is no longer either desireable or possible to expend our energy trying to resuscitate the dying theisms of yesterday. No revival of these dying systems is possible. To deny this reality to perpetuate an enduring religious delusion. Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past. And it will not work. The time has come to create a new thing. Not a new religious coping device that will enable us to bank the fires of hysteria for another generation, but a new way to affirm self-consciousness as an asset and to seek within it that which is timeless, eternal, real, and true . . .

The time has surely come when human beings must begin a new exploration into the divine, must sketch out a vision of the holy that is beyond theism but not beyond the reality for which the word God was created to point.

 

[sandandfoam]

I've started reading a little bit about Gnosticism (The Gnostic Gospels - Elaine Pagels), I'm already smitten by Pelagius, I find a lot that resonates with me in heresy. A lot of what is contained in the op. has been said before, and it sits well.
I must read him. Thanks for the pointer.

 

[sandandfoam]

Read any of the three books: "Why Christianity Must Change or Die", "A New Christianity For A New World" or "Jesus For the Non-Religious" for some excellent insights on this. I've been a Spong fan for several years now.

He's an apostle to the non-religious much in the same way Paul was an apostle to the "gentiles." I doubt he or people to whom his approach and writings appeal care whether traditional "Christians" approve of the way they understand Christianity. That's the whole point of a reformation after all, isn't it?

System won't let me frubal!, I'm off to Amazon. Thanks.

 

[Quiddity]

As a Christian, how do you react to Spong's call for a new reformation?

By raising the price of indulgences.

That'll teach em a lesson.

 

[Quiddity]

Spong would probably make a good Buddhist or secular humanist. What he is saying is not new and its not something Christians have ever said.

...:yes:...

 

[doppelganger]

Isn't this a DIR? Ahem . . .

 

[Quiddity]

Isn't this a DIR? Ahem . . .

Oops...

Curse the statistic links.

 

[TashaN]

**MOD POST**​

This is the DIR for Liberal Christianity. Please make sure you know the rules of DIRs before posting.​

 

[Wandered Off]

He takes the position that "belief in the existence of God" as a discreet thing or being is no longer comprehensible or meaningful to most people and instead that a re-opening of the divine experience from which "God" notions arise is where the future of human spirituality (and perhaps its past) really lies.

It's interesting how much his ideas are similar to those of Anglican Bishop Don Cupitt's. From Sea of Faith:

It is through this process of death and rebirth that Christianity must continually pass to renew itself. A living faith never was found and never will be found in any other way. We have to dispense entirely with all ideas of holding on to the truth of old meanings.
...
And so, returning to the question of what has happened and is happening to belief in God, it should be clear now that one particular meaning of God is evidently passing away, evaporating in the hands not of its enemies but of its own best proponents. People have been struggling for too long to hold on to a meaning of God which is passing away, no doubt because they think that this meaning is the meaning, the only possible meaning. But if meanings change and must be reminted then we should be looking for signs of a profound mutation of Christianity, a reforging of all its meanings.
...
Most people begin by thinking of their own religious beliefs as being 'literally' or descriptively true; as describing - however inadequately - real beings, forces and states of affairs. Thus there is supposed to be an objective God, another and higher world, a life after death and so forth. We call this naive kind of belief theological realism. Natural though it seems, there must be something wrong with it, for nowadays we have highly refined tests and standards for what is to count as knowledge, and by those criteria no religious belief whatever today belongs to the public body of tested knowledge.
...
A belief is made religious, not so much by its content, as rather by the way it is held. This suggests that religious beliefs should be understood not in the realist way, but rather as being more like moral convictions. They are not universal truths but community-truths, and they guide lives rather than describe facts.
...
The first conscious believers are appearing, people who know that religion is just human but have come to see that it is no less vital to us for that. Religion has to be human; it could not be otherwise, for it would not work as religion unless it were simply human.

 

[doppelganger]

It's interesting how much his ideas are similar to those of Don Cupitt's. From Sea of Faith:

It's what Christian mystics and "gnostics" have been saying all along. And a natural result of the process of turning Christian myths and symbology to act as a psychological pointer instead of regarding it as history or metaphysics.

Meister Eckhart, Joseph Campbell, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (in his latter works), and many of the early "Gnostic" texts, have taken this same approach (as have many philosophers).

Spong's "New Reformation" is a new take on the age old project of turning the symbols of Christianity around to point to the "mystery of Christ" within.

 

[Wandered Off]

For Christians interested in debating the topic (since debate is off-limits here in the DIR), a similar thread has been posted in Same Faith Debates:
http://www.religiousforums.com/forum/same-faith-debates/67337-new-reformation-spongs-12-theses.html

 

[spiritually inclined]

The first conscious believers are appearing, people who know that religion is just human but have come to see that it is no less vital to us for that. Religion has to be human; it could not be otherwise, for it would not work as religion unless it were simply human.

I like the above quote. I'm not completely sure, but I believe Spong says in his autobiography that he was influenced deeply by Don Cupitt and his book Sea of Faith.

James

 

[doppelganger]

I like the above quote. I'm not completely sure, but I believe Spong says in his autobiography that he was influenced deeply by Don Cupitt and his book Sea of Faith.

James

He was. And also by Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be.

 

[sojourner]

I am becoming more and more convinced that religion is more an interior impetus, which gives rise to acts of goodness and life, rather than an exterior force, which acts upon us in mystical and spiritual ways. To a point, I agree with the poster who said that religion must be a human endeavor. But I don't think religion can be fully human. For it to be so, it would be...humanism. Religion serves to raise humanity to an awareness of Divinity. Whether that Divinity is a man in a beard, or the spark of life, or Angellous Evangellous -- these are all simply different models for conceptualizing the Divine. Spong, in point 1, is simply calling for new models.