Examining the Meaning of the Resurrection, Part I: Setting the Stage

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 25 May 2011 4 Comments
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Question

It has been our privilege to hear your lectures at Highlands, and they are always exciting and provocative. We feel your message to the world is “Copernican” in scope and potential.  We have read all your books through the years, but I don’t recall you ever addressing the idea of the concept of the “Origin of God” in humanity’s time.  Do you have a hunch or idea or knowledge of when this concept entered the human drama?

Answer

Dear Helen and Bill,

Thank you for your letter.  I have addressed that subject in my book Eternal Life: A New Vision but perhaps not in the way you might expect.

I do not believe the human brain can speak to the origin of God.  We can speak to the origin of the human concept of God, but that is something quite different.  That idea I believe is born in the moment that self-consciousness breaks through consciousness in human development.  That human idea almost always portrays God as external to this world, invisible or located beyond the limits of our sight, which is what “above the sky” means.  This deity is then endowed with supernatural power and is said to be ready to come to our aid if we worship properly, obey God’s rules and pray sufficiently hard.  It is what I have called a “theistic” concept of God.  Theism is a definition of God from the childhood of our humanity and ultimately it needs to be abandoned.  Most of us cling to it tenaciously because we do not know any other way to envision the holy.

I think that we must ultimately move beyond theism into a mystical experience.  Atheism does not mean the belief that there is no God; it means that theism is simply a dead and meaningless concept.  In Eternal Life, I tried to point my audience in that new direction.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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