Do Our Seminaries Prepare Clergy for Today’s World?

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 27 November 2014 2 Comments
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Question

I have read your book Eternal Life: A New Vision with great interest and have found in it much to which I can relate. Apart from a brief mention of childhood prayers (which frightened you because of their association with death) you do not say whether we should pray to this God of yours whom we should strive to find deep within ourselves. Theologians like John Bowker, however, hold that prayer is essential and holds the key to growing into a knowledge of God – whatever we mean by that term. Your thoughts on this subject please.

Answer

Dear Susie,

Thank you for your letter and your comments. If you look at the bibliography of that book, you will see that I cite two of John Bowker’s books as references. They are God: A Brief History and The Cambridge History of Religion. He is a particular favorite of mine and I was introduced to his work by Karen Armstrong.

But, Susie, Eternal Life: A New Vision - Beyond Religion - Beyond Theism- Beyond Heaven and Hell was not a book about prayer. It had a very clear single focus. Like Bowker, I too believe that prayer is essential, but before I could have that conversation, I would have to re-define both what I mean by God and what I mean by prayer. God is not a Santa Claus like figure to whom endless requests are to be made along with the promise to be good so as to deserve that for which we ask and prayer is not a matter of petitioning a supernatural being above the sky to do something for me that I cannot do for myself. Prayer is much more about developing a relationship with the realm of the spirit that helps me to redefine who God is, what it means to be human and what it means to be related to that which is both ultimate and holy. Prayer as I both understand it and practice it would be closer to the meaning of words like meditation and contemplation than it seems to mean to most people who use the word prayer today.

The Christian life calls me to walk into a new kind of human maturity and stop pretending that there is a heavenly parent out there somewhere, who is ready to protect me in need and to come to my aid when I am imperiled. To enter this discussion means that I must be open to develop a new definition of what the word “God” means and a new understanding of what prayer is all about. John Bowker’s definition of prayer, to which you refer, seems to me to be in harmony with what I am trying to describe. If I had addressed this subject in my book on eternal life, it would have added some 200 pages to the text.

I have written on prayer a number of times in this column. I have two chapters on prayer in my book, A New Christianity for a New World. My first book, written in 1972 called Honest Prayer, has just been brought back into print by St. Johann Press in Haworth, New Jersey. I have not, however, undertaken to write a whole new volume on this subject and probably will not.

One of my younger colleagues, The Reverend Gretta Vosper, a pastor in the United Church of Canada, has done so and Harper Collins of Toronto has published it under the title Amen. It is the best book I have read on prayer in the forty years of my writing career. I commend that book to you.

John Shelby Spong

 

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