Walter Cameron Righter 1923-2011: A Great Bishop

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 22 September 2011 2 Comments
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Question

Thank you for your comments on the tragic happening in Norway.  It brought to my mind this question:  Was Adolph Hitler simply a madman with egocentric ideas or did WWII and the Holocaust simply exhibit the extreme end to what centuries of anti-Semitism, wars between rival nations and ambitions of tyrannical national leaders could lead to in Christendom?

Answer

Dear Walter,

I cannot answer your question in the way you have posed it because I do not see history in such either/or categories.

Hitler was a madman and an egomaniac.  Someone who can systematically annihilate six million Jews, countless Slavs, mental and physical cripples and homosexuals under the guise of “purifying the human race” is clearly not in touch with the reality that possesses most of us.  At the same time, however, personal hatred placed so often and so regularly into the blood stream of human history will almost always finally erupt in killing violence.  We have seen it happen in Christianity in such activities as the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust, to say nothing of religious persecution and religious wars. There are other factors like greed and the intense nationalism, which suggests that a single nation has both God and righteousness on its side.

While religion has within it the seeds of self transcendence, it also wrestles with the intense and deep survival needs that human beings share with all living things. We human beings are, so far as we know, the only self-conscious creatures in the universe and as such might have the power to move beyond survival as the highest value of our lives.

When Jesus was quoted as having said: “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly,” he was asserting that there is something beyond the struggle to become, namely the freedom to be.  I do not think that human life is “fallen.”  I do not think “original sin” is a reality.  What I believe instead is that we human beings have not yet achieved the fullness of our potential humanity and to help us do that is, I am convinced, the essence of what the Christian faith is all about.

Thank you for writing.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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