Louisville Process Theology Network

John Shelby Spong's Religion IV

Nov 23, 2009

Question from the audience: I was very struck when you were talking tonight. I was reminded of one of my favorite lines by G K Chesterton when he talks about the difference between a poet and a mathematician; and he says the poet seeks to get his head into the clouds and the mathematician seeks to get the clouds in his head, and it's his head that splits.

I'm curious as to whether your sense of the divine is about getting your head into the clouds. And I don't mean that in a kind of a fluffy naive sense, but the talk of wonderment that you were speaking about.

And if in fact you're leading us, you're talking about with words a kind of word lesseners, and a form of mysticism which seems to run through a lot of what you say.


Bishop Spong: I have always been sort of a rationalist, an over-developed left-brain person, an under-developed right brain person. And rationalism has been the method I had to understand it before I could give myself to it.

My theme in one of the books that I've written is that the heart will never worship what the mind rejects. And so my religion has got to sort of appeal to mind and heart.

What I discover in my life is that rational thought only carries you to a point, and it can't get beyond that because you're landlocked by your rational categories, you simply can't get beyond that.

If horses had gods they would look like horses, so human gods inevitably look like human beings because I cannot escape the limits of my humanity to describe god any other way except by human analogy.

And yet my experience of God drives me beyond words into silence, into wonder. If anybody had said to me 25 years ago you would wind up closer to the mystics than to any other part of the Christian tradition, I would have said you got the wrong person, that's just not who I am. But that's who I find myself being today. And I'm quite content to allow that to take place.

God for me is infinite mystery but ever real. Stoddard Kennedy, an English poet described God as like the sea beneath the sun, it never changes and yet it ever changes - it's always in transition. And that's the way my life now seems to be. I journey through the doorway of my tradition, Jesus is very important to me. I go through that doorway but inside that doorway I experience transcendence and a wonder that just cannot be bound by creeds or traditions or even what I call the Christian faith.

God is bigger than all of that, and I'm content to have that journey continue, and I regard that as a beautiful and wonderful journey.

Let me say that I've gotten to the place where I identify God primarily with things that are universal like life and love and being. And so I worship by living and enabling others to live as fully as possible. I worship by loving and enabling others to love as fully as possible.

I worship by daring to be who I am, and having the courage to enable everybody else to be who they are, and that's the kind of Christian life I want to live, and that's the kind of Christian church or a church dedicated to doing that that I want to build, and I want us to take seriously our heritage, our background, our historic symbols, but I don't want us to make idols out of any one of them.

I want them all to be things that we open, so we travel beyond them into the wondrous mystery of God who is for me the eternal reality. I cannot be apart from that reality. It would be a lie for me to say that that reality is not true for me.

It's the deepest reality that I know, and I commend this sort of journey into the mystery of God to the people of this nation and to the people of the world.