JUNE 26, 2013, A GREAT DAY FOR AMERICA

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 4 July 2013 1 Comments
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Question

I greatly admire your writings and find them very helpful to me in understanding how it is possible to be a Christian in this day and age. I have a question, however, that intrigues me. I have just read a wonderful book about the 16th century heretic, Michael Servetus. It is entitled: Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone. Servetus was burned at the stake by John Calvin for being an anti-Trinitarian. I was struck by how modern (and appealing to me) the beliefs of Servetus sounded and how much that seemed to me like what I understand that you believe. I was also surprised to learn that his early followers started what became the Unitarian Church. Do you consider yourself somewhat like the Unitarians?

Answer

Dear Jean,

Servetus was a great reformation leader. He was a “heretic” only to those who condemned him. To accuse a person of heresy assumes that the truth is actually known and that the one who makes the heresy charge actually possesses it. I think participants on both sides of that equation dangle between being ignorant and being idolatrous. They are ignorant because they think they know what ultimately cannot be known, namely the nature of God. They are idolatrous because they have identified God with a definition of God produced by the limited human mind. In effect these people have bound God inside human words and concepts. They have created God and think that their creation is God. That is the meaning of idolatry.

Trinitarians defined God as a Trinity. Unitarians objected to that definition and insisted that God is a unity. That is a debate in which few people engage today and this rhetoric of the past seems strange to modern ears. I do not believe that the holy God can ever be defined by anyone. All any of us can ever really do is to define our own human experience of God. There is a vast difference between God and my experience of God.

I have great admiration for the Unitarian-Universalist Church. I have been invited to lecture in Unitarian churches across this country. When I taught at Harvard Divinity School in 2000, several of my pre-ordination students were Unitarians. I think that all but one of them are now pastors in Unitarian-Universalist’s churches today. They were among my most talented students and I deeply appreciated my opportunity to know them.

I am, however, quite content to remain in the Episcopal Church and to define myself primarily as a Christian, even a Trinitarian Christian. I am sometimes embarrassed by some parts of my church. The bishops of the Church of England, the mother church of us Episcopalians, seem to me to be quite often caught up in unbelievably silly positions - -women may be priests, but not bishops; homosexuals may be cathedral deans, but not bishops; homosexuals may get married, but they have to remain celibate.

Periodically the Anglican Communion produces frontier thinking bishops, who are castigated and opposed by the church hierarchy in their lifetimes, only to be claimed and appreciated within a generation after their deaths. I think particularly of my mentor, Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar, John A. T. Robinson. I would laugh at all of these positions if I did not understand the hurt that is visited by them on so many. When I realize that, I am more prone to weep than to laugh. I do want my church always to allow and to encourage rigorous theological debate and that cannot happen if anyone suggests that the truth of God has already been received and codified.

The great gift and witness of the Unitarian-Universalist tradition is and has been that they engage without fear the theological issues of the day. Servetus was one of the great pioneers of that tradition and the Unitarians keep the torch of theological learning alive at the congregational level.

John Shelby Spong

 

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