My Mentors, Part 5 - Richard Henry Baker

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 27 June 2013 1 Comments
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Question

I have been following your work for many years, especially when we were living in New York Now in retirement in California, I found your book A New Christianity for a New World most helpful, as if tailor made to fit my needs. Before retirement, I had essentiality two roles: one of chaplain and lecturer in religion at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (1965-1976) and director of the Chinese Program, National Churches of Christ in the USA (1976-1993). Experiences in these two roles have sealed my definition as a bi-cultural person with dual belongings in value systems of both Chinese traditions and Christianity, despite the fact that I was born in the U.S. (San Francisco Chinatown).

In Hong Kong and Asia, I learned so much about Chinese and East Asian traditions, especially from students, colleagues and other faculty members. I was very much attracted to the best in the Confucian tradition, especially “Neo-Confucianism,” after classical Confucianism had interacted for centuries with native Daoism and Indic Buddhism to become a more inclusive system that embodies nature and the cosmos. While in New York, I attended monthly Neo-Confucian seminars at Columbia University, where professors from colleges and universities of the Atlantic seaboard did rigorous exegesis of ancient texts, the envy of Christian scholars.

In retirement I still worship regularly with my wife in a local Presbyterian congregation for the sake of discipline and community, although all of my work has been in ecumenical contexts. I have found Christian worship, however, to be essentially boring banality. Its confession and absolution are too facile, not to mention that my sins are much more sophisticated than what the superficiality of the confession texts state. Maybe this is all as you mentioned in your book, “familiarity breeds contempt.” I actually resonated well with your quote of Bonhoeffer in the Preface, especially “Before God and with God we live without God.”

Your liberating of Christianity from theism has enabled faith for me to converge more directly with so much in the Chinese and East Asian traditions. My first encounter with ridding the supernatural from Christianity was from David Ray Griffin’s book: Reechantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Cornell University Press, 2001). His rigorous and specific critique really did it for me.

Your intellectual honesty (a la John A. T. Robinson) resonates well with the best in Neo-Confucian fundamentalism, which is the fundamental commitment to the human discourse. Your beginning with the dawn of humanity’s consciousness and the struggle for survival reminded me of Robert N. Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard 2011), an interreligious work which took Bellah 15 years to write after retirement. The 746 pages appear to be his reading notes to himself.

Your stating that the description of religious experience can never encompass the entirety of that experience resonates well with the Daoist claim that all articulations of experience, if absolutized, can be “an idolatry of words.”

Your Christianity of expansion into larger and larger realms of exclusivity resonates with the best of the Confucian paradigm of each person being a center of relationship from family, to community, to society, to nation, to world, to the cosmos (ping tian xia) “all under heaven.”

Your integrating good and evil is likened to the Daoist yin-yang, where everything in life is seen an interconnected. There is no facile isolating of that which is “evil,” since every person is a combination of many facets of personhood. There is little dichotomy in Daosim; life and death are one.

Your idea of giving away self and love resonates well with Buddhist non-attachment to things, to loved ones, to life, even one’s own. It is the art of letting go in both Christian and Buddhist kenosis, though the latter has made it a vocation.

Your emphasis on the imperative of community is also central to Confucianism where to be human requires at least two; no one is an atomistic individual.

In retirement I have been trying to stay intellectually alive by reviewing books for an academic journal, China Review International, Center for Chinese Studies, University of Hawaii. To date they have published close to 70 of my reviews since 1995.

Thank you for answering one of my most fundamental questions by demythologizing the notion of a theist parent/fixer, alleviating us of all responsibility.

Answer

Dear Franklin,

Thank you for your incredible letter and for your permission to reprint it in my column. I think it gives my readers a sense of how rich a cross-cultural religious experience can be. I have gained much from my dialogues with Hindus in India, Buddhists in China, Jews and Muslims in the USA.

Perhaps we can get our churches to work on their prayers of confession so that they can be developed to cover “the sophistication” of your sins. I like that idea!

I would love to meet you someday.

John Shelby Spong

 

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