America's Health Care Debate and What it Reveals

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 5 December 2013 6 Comments
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Question

Your columns are always thought provoking and filled with such wisdom. Thanks for sharing your incredible knowledge and insight with us. I was thrilled when you came to Chattanooga several years ago and I actually got to hear you in person at Grace Church. A recent column reminded me of one you wrote last summer right before my granddaughter was to be baptized. In last summer’s column you wrote about performing a baptism and being struck with the language used in the baptismal service.

I have been a member of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Chattanooga for over 40 years, but I have to admit I was a little surprised when my son, who lives with his wife and daughter in California, said he wanted to have his daughter baptized here in the church where he grew up. Although he is a very spiritual person, he hasn’t attended church for years. I myself rarely attend services at our church because when hearing the liturgy and reciting the creeds, I feel as if I am being forced to wear shoes that I have outgrown and that feel several sizes too small. I am eternally grateful, however, that the church allows our dream group to meet there and encourages our “sacred studies” group to hold weekend workshops there as well. I have thanked our priest on more than one occasion for being open to letting me and the others explore our spirituality in unconventional ways.

Back to my granddaughter’s baptism. We couldn’t have the service in the church because there are only certain Sundays used for joint baptisms and their visit didn’t fall on one of those Sundays. We decided to have the service at a family cabin on a lake in the woods and a friend of mine, who is an Episcopal priest, but has no parish, agreed to perform the baptism. When she sent the service to my son to read, he said he didn’t like it because there was way too much talk about sin. It was right about this time that your column came out so I sent it to him. He agreed with everything you said! My priest friend then sent him the Australian service which she thought might be more to his liking. The mention of sin in this version was a turn off as well. He said all they wanted to do was to introduce their daughter to God’s love. The priest was bound by her vows to use some form of Episcopal liturgy so my son went online and found a pastor in Chattanooga from the Unity Church who was thrilled over performing the service. It was his first baptism and he wrote the service himself. It was absolutely glorious!

You have opened up a monumentally important topic in that column and closed with the question, “What can we do about it?” I await your response with an open mind and eager anticipation.

Answer

Dear Alice,

First, may I say that I am delighted you found the Unity Church. That group of Christians seems to me to be moving in the path that the church of the future must move and I applaud them. I think they are leading in the direction that more mainline churches will inevitably go in the future. Traditional religious concepts, however, die slowly and sometimes only after exhausting themselves in denial and irrelevance.

The major problem with most baptism liturgies, including those of my own church, is that they were developed as the cure for a diagnosis that is simply wrong. They assume the pre-modern mythology that there was in the beginning an original perfection of which originally perfect human beings were a part. That is portrayed biblically in the story of the perfection in the mythical Garden of Eden. According to this biblical story, however, that perfection was broken by human disobedience, which in turn plunged human beings and the whole world into original sin. That is portrayed in the biblical story of the fall and subsequent banishment of the first human family from the Garden of Eden. It was this story that formed the original theological framework in which baptism has been cast. It postulates an originally perfect creation, which was ruined by original sin. Apart from the cleansing waters of baptism, life is doomed to be lived apart from God. That is why the church once taught that unbaptized babies suffered in hell for all eternity. That idea was so repugnant that in time it was modified and “Limbo for unbaptized children” was developed. This Limbo was not a place of eternal punishment, but it was a place where its inhabitants were forever denied the vision of God’s presence.

This theology turns God into a monster who does not know how to forgive. The primary desire of this God is to punish unless this God can rescue. This theology turns Jesus into the ultimate victim of God’s wrath. Jesus had to pay the price that God required for our sins. It turns you and me into guilt-filled victims. The good news, however, is that this theology is based on presuppositions that are being dismissed increasingly because they are simply wrong.

There was no original perfection. There was rather a long and complicated evolution from matter, to life, to consciousness, to self-consciousness. If there was no original perfection, there could have been no fall from perfection, so original sin is simply wrong and it has got to go. If there was no fall into sin, then seeing Jesus as the savior who rescues us from the fall that never happened, to restore us to a status that we have never possessed, becomes absolute nonsense. We must develop a new way to tell the Christ story.

Human life is not fallen, it is incomplete. We do not need a savior, we need the love and affirmation that accepts us as we are and empowers us to be all that we are capable of being. Your son’s comment that all he wanted to do was to introduce his daughter to the love of God is dead accurate. That is what baptism is supposed to be about.

I did a baptism several weeks ago in my church in Morristown and before I began, I tried to defang the baptismal liturgy. We still have a long way to go. I encourage clergy in all traditions to work on the theology and liturgy of baptism. Until those liturgies are changed, I urge parents to get past the words of most baptismal liturgies until you find the words “Bring them to the fullness of God’s peace and glory.” That is what baptism is all about.

John Shelby Spong

 

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