Book: A New Christianity for a New World

Author: John Shelby Spong
Publisher:

I must confess at the very outset that I am not very well grounded in the Bible scholarship or deep comprehension of Christianity. In spite of these shortcomings, I can relate to Bishop John Shelby Spong and admit that I like his rationalistic and ‘non-literal’ critical understanding of Christianity. Not the understanding of Christianity from the viewpoint of what traditionally it is, but what it ‘ought to be.’

I came across John Spong’s works only recently and have read from some of them and intend to read the rest of them, as much as I am able to do. Naturally, there is quite a bit of repetition in them, which is inevitable if each book is to be made complete in its own scope by itself, but there are essentially new and fresh insights in them. He has criticized so many different aspects of the traditional and orthodox theistic faith in his works that one wonders as to what is the residual Christian faith that he embraces. He has, many a time, come close to the borderline and hesitated to overstep into non-belief, agnosticism, or even atheism.; he remains a believer.

It is difficult to understand the ‘reality’ or (probably more accurately) ‘realism’ of his faith. He has tried to clarify it in this book and elsewhere also in his other books but his explanation is quite mystical. The rationalists can easily relate to it because Bishop Spong is not ‘literalist’ orthodox in his outlook and he genuinely attempts to put Christianity on a rational footing. Such a task is extremely difficult but his attempt is worthy of respect and admiration.

In his chapter (Eight) on “Jesus Beyond Incarnation”, he states honestly and with candor, “Explanations warp truth with the passage of time. So the real question I have to answer is whether I can capture the essence of this Jesus in words that transcend the patterns of yesterday and yet will still be able to affirm, and to invite my world to affirm, the Christian-experience. To put it bluntly, with theism no longer a concept I can salute, can this Jesus still be God-experience for me? Can he still be for me a doorway into and an expression of the holy? The answers to these questions, quite frankly, whether what I am seeking is a genuine reformation of Christianity or whether I am deluded and in my suppressed fear attempting to hide from or cover up the death of Christianity, The stakes are thus obviously high as I begin this chapter.”

He concluded this chapter in mystical vagueness yet clearly stating “God is beyond Jesus.” He says, “Jesus will always be for me the standard by which I measure the God-experience of any other. I can view him in no other way. In that sense, and in that sense only, he remains for me the way, the truth, and the life, the doorway through which I enter the holiness of God. The God I worship will be, however, available from many doorways. For me to claim otherwise is to remain a victim of theism. The God who is life, love, and being itself cannot be bounded by the limits of my tradition. God is beyond Jesus, but Jesus participated in the Being of God, and Jesus is my way into God.”

Spong is being pulled from both sides; pure rationalism makes him assert “God is beyond Jesus” and his faith brings him back to assert “Jesus participated in the Being of God,” whatever it may mean.

In the preface of his book, Spong mentions that he was greatly inspired by John A. T. Robinson who was area bishop with a title of Bishop of Woolwich. Woolwich is one of the subdivisions within the Diocese of Southwark, which covers the suburbs of London south of the Thames. Robinson was Spong’s contemporary and kind of alter ego in some ways. Robinson wrote a book “Honest to God” in 1963, which drew the ire of the clergy. Like Robinson who opposed the ban on D.H. Lawrence’s book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Spong has spearheaded his moral and strong support for the cause of homosexuality. According to him, homosexuality is a biological condition and not an individual choice.

Some of his other mentors include Dietrich Bonhoeffer who called for a “Christianity apart from religion,” and Paul Tillich who insisted that “God could no longer be defined as a being, but must be approached non-personally as the Ground of All Being.”

On the frontispiece of Preface of his book is the following quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as those who manage our lives without God. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continuously. Before God and with God we live without God.

…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.

It is difficult to cover the ground that Bishop Spong has traversed in his book in such a brief review. I will be content here to give the captions of the various chapters of the book; those who are interested will need to read the book themselves.

Preface The Origins of This Book: From Honest to God to Why
Christianity Must Change or Die
ONE A Place to Begin: The Old Is No More; The New Is Not
Yet
TWO The Sign of the Death of Theism
THREE Self-Consciousness and Theism: Siamese Twins at Birth
FOUR Beyond Theism but Not Beyond God
FIVE The Original Christ: Before the Theistic Distortion
SIX Watching Theism Capture Christianity
SEVEN Changing the Basic Christian Myth
EIGHT Jesus Beyond Incarnation: A Nontheistic Divinity
NINE Original Sin Is Out: The Reality of Evil Is In
TEN Beyond Evangelism and World Mission to a Post
Theistic Universalism
ELEVEN But What About Prayer?
TWELVE The Ecclesia of Tomorrow
THIRTEEN Why Does It Matter? The Public Face ofEcclesia
FOURTEEN The Courage to Move into the Future
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

The book was published by HarperSanFrancisco, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers in 2001 and has 276 pages. On its back cover are printed several brief appreciative reviews of various reviewers. Karen Armstrong (author of A History of God) wrote, “Spong demonstrates how it is possible to make the faith a force against the injustice and the lack of compassion in our modern society.