Louisville Process Theology Network

John Shelby Spong's Religion III

Nov 18, 2009

Question from the audience: What hope is there for those of us who are in exile?

Bishop Spong: Oh, okay. Thank you. Well I've been called the Bishop for the exile. And I do want to claim that as a congregation of faithful people who are searching within everything. I don't know that I can tell you that there's an answer.

You see I think faith means that you journey into the unknown. The absence of faith I think is the clinging to the artifacts of yesterday because you are afraid if you let them go there will be no God in the tomorrow. I think God is real and my understanding of God constantly evolves.

I have a close friend who is a physicist, who told me once upon a time that though he was raised in an Anglican church he had long gotten away from that. But when he was working in the field of theoretical physics at the University of London he got into the structure of matter. He got into the subatomic levels, he got into quantum weirdness, and he got into the relationship of the observer with the observed, and it was a whole new world for him.

And he said I was so taken by this reality that I found myself filled with what I could only call awe and wonder, and I wanted to express this awe and this wonder.

And I said to myself well that means I want to worship. And he said I don't know where to go to worship. The only place I've ever heard of going to worship is a church. And so he said I think I'll go back and try the church again. And he went back and he said it lasted for about six weeks.

He said the god I met in church was so trivial. It was a god who had little answers to great big complex human questions. The creeds were not road maps that help us walk into the mystery of God they were straight jackets into which I had to force my mind to reside. And he said I finally couldn't stand it and I left and returned to my laboratory where I continue to be a worshipper of the god that I find in the subatomic realm of matter, and I wish I could find a community where I could go and share this faith with.

Well what I want the church to be is not a congregation of all those who have the answers. I want it to be a pilgrimage of people who raise questions, and who don't have their hands slapped by the church saying but the church teaches or but the bible says, as if that's where all truth is finally located.

I want us to honor the questions and to walk into the mystery of God together; hopefully saying that yes the people who are alienated from my religious tradition but who find wonder and mystery and awe in the world of physics or chemistry or astronomy, have also a great deal to teach us. Our god is so much bigger than most of us think our god is.

Now J B Phillips wrote a book many years ago that I thought the book was terrible but the title was wonderful. And the title was Your God is too Small.

I wish I could sort of put that on the front door of every church in the world, because I think all of us have narrowed god down to something that we feel we can somehow get control of, and I think God is so much more than that.

Yes.


Question from the audience: You mentioned two words, holocaust and ethnic cleansing, both sins in our immediate past and indeed in our present.

In the liturgies across our tradition we have a confession, usually confession of sin, and then an absolution, and often the absolution contains the words 'in the name of Christ your sins or our sins are forgiven'. I'd appreciate you commenting on that part of our liturgies.

Bishop Spong: Well I hope no one will ever hear me suggesting that evil is not real. I think the great fault of liberal thinkers throughout the age is that they have not taken the depth of evil present in human life seriously enough.

I think human beings will do anything. I don't think it's any evil beyond the capacity of human beings to do. Ethnic cleansing is just one other.

I don't know animals that do ethnic cleansing; only human beings do ethnic cleansing. In my country in the last three or four years there have been two murders that were so graphic and horrible that they became worldwide stories.
One was the story of a man whose name was James Bird who was taken by some people in Jasper, Texas and attached by a chain to the bumper of a pick-up truck and dragged across a gravel country road until he was not just dead but dismembered.

And when asked why they did that, they responded that they did not like the color of his skin. I can't imagine dogs doing that to other dogs.

And the other was a murder of a young man just 21 years old who happened to have been an Anglican and an acolyte and an active member of one of our churches, and he was set upon by a group of people, and they beat him unconscious and they hung him up on a fence post in sub freezing weather in Wyoming and left him there until he died.

His name was Mathew Shepherd. And the reason they did that is that they did not like his sexual orientation. I don't put any evil past human beings. The question is where does it come from?

I think it comes out of our evolutionary history.
I don't think we were created good and corrupted God's creation by falling into sin so that we need a rescue operation.

I think we were created single selves and we emerged in complexity and in self consciousness and we learned how to survive, and the way we survived is that we made our survival the highest value of our lives which locked us into a radical self-centeredness and anything that it takes to survive, we human beings are willing to do.

So that salvation would be being called beyond your security systems, beyond your tribal identity, beyond your religious sense of superiority, beyond your gender identifications of value and no value, beyond your prejudices into a valley of free humanity.

And the only way I know how to illustrate that is to ask people a question. When I was in England I found English people a little bit stiffer, upper lipped than Australians or Americans. So they had a lot of trouble answering this question. Well let me try it on this loose Australian group.

How many of you are in love? Please raise your hands. Takes a while but the hands do go up. I'm in love, I have a very precious wife who's sitting down here on the first row and I absolutely adore her. But let me tell you what being in love does for me. It gives me a taste of a new kind of humanity.

When I love Christine, I discover that I love her more than I love my own life. That I value her living more than I value my living. So I would have no difficulty if I were forced into a set of circumstances dying so that she might live. I love her more than I love my life. That's what it means to be in love. You value somebody beyond yourself.

Well I think that's an analogy of what the love of God is all about. When we engage the love of God, we engage it in such a way that we begin to escape our self centered survival needs. We begin to be able to live for another person. We are able to give our lives and our love away.

And when I look at the Jesus story, that's what I see. I see a life so whole and so full and so free and so loving and so capable of being who he is under every set of circumstances that he could give his life away, not just for his beloved but for the least of these, our brothers and sisters. He shows me a picture of a new humanity, a barrier-free humanity.

He calls me and empowers me to step outside my security system into that new humanity. And I believe that when I am fully human and fully loving that people will see the God that I worship manifested through my life-giving and my love-giving and my calling others to be who they are. That's the god I see in Jesus, that's why I stay in this tradition, and that's why it means everything in the world to me.

That's why I wrestle to make sure that the power of that experience is alive and well for people who are 21st century people and who can't think in the traditional patterns of the 1st century any longer, and they think that if Christianity is identified just with those patterns they can no longer be Christians. I want to open a new possibility.




To be continuted in the next post.