I attended an event sponsored by an Episcopal Seminary, likely laying foundations for fundraising. Hearing how seminarians are prepared for their encounter with fundamentalists, e.g. those anticipating the Rapture, I posed the question: Can (and should) Christianity be experienced fully and to good effect on a non-metaphysical platform? Expressed differently, will the graduates of this seminary generally be comfortable ministering to a congregation that finds metaphysical formulations of Christianity off-putting?
The response I received was to the effect that, while some Episcopalians have a non-metaphysical faith that works for them, the role of metaphysics remains strong. I take from that an assumption that a proper formation of seminarians need not include serious consideration of Christian faith without metaphysics.
While I believe that financial support of seminaries is critical to a vibrant future for the church, that future seems to me at risk if seminarians aren’t encouraged to envision a faith without metaphysics. Are some (Episcopal) seminaries less frightened by traditionalists and fundamentalists? Your writings are acknowledged but, at least in this case, kept at a distance. What have you found hopeful in the formation of our future church leaders?
Dear Bill,
It is difficult to respond to a report from an event at an Episcopal seminary at which I was not present. My experience is that people hear very different things at the same gathering. You also use the word metaphysical as if its meaning is simple and universally the same. That is also not my experience. Metaphysical literally means beyond the physical as if there is a division between the physical and the non-physical that everyone understands. That is not the case. So allow me to try to respond to what I think you are asking in your letter.
In most theological seminaries, it is my concern that the students are being prepared for positions of leadership that will no longer exist in another generation. It is not simply a matter of metaphysics. It is a matter of God being defined in theistic terms when only people inside religious ghettos still think of God this way. By theistic terms I mean that definition of God as a being, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere external to this world, usually thought of as “above the sky” and capable of intervening in human history in supernatural ways to answer prayers or to accomplish the divine purpose. That is the primary understanding of the God who is worshipped in most seminary chapels and parish churches. It permeates our liturgies, our hymns, our prayers and our sermons. Indeed in some services it is so stifling that one leaves worship tied up in knots. This is the all-seeing God of judgment before whom we kneel and beg for mercy, a God frequently confused with Santa Claus, who is making a list and checking it twice!. I think this theistic definition of God died over the last 500 years of expanded knowledge, yet it still lives in the imaginations of the traditionally religious. The idea that Jesus is understood as the incarnation of this theistic deity into a human life is one more aspect of the same mentality.
Then when the purpose of Jesus’ life is described as “dying for my sins,” we find ourselves dealing with a deity who is a monster. Proclaiming a “Father God,” who supposedly kills his divine son to bring about forgiveness (how that works is never explained), is not to recognize that this definition of God presents God as the “ultimate child abuser.” This Christology also still assumes the truth of “original sin,” an idea that died when we first discovered that there was no original perfection from which we might have fallen, but rather, an evolving process that took us over billions of years from single cell life to complex, self-conscious life. So the idea of a good creation, followed by a fall into sin, followed by redemption from this fall by God in the work of salvation, which restores us to that status for which we were originally intended, simply no longer makes sense to modern ears. Religious thinking dies slowly, but the death of traditional forms of religion over the last hundred years has been startling. I do not think many of our denominational seminaries have come anywhere close to addressing these things. Some live in denial and assert that there is no collapse going on in organized religion. Some despair that religion is becoming violent and extremist, something that is part of the death process itself. Some pretend that the old way of doing religion, which hasn’t worked for years, will somehow begin to work if we only learn to do it better. Few are willing to walk into the gathering storm and to engage the issues openly, having already concluded they are not capable of doing this.
These are clearly exceptions in the world of theological education. The seminary I attended in the mid 50’s introduced me to the work of Paul Tillich, who is the singular theologian of the 20th century who tried to address these issues. At the same time, that seminary never mentioned to me the name of Rudolf Bultmann, who had revolutionized New Testament scholarship in the first half of the 20th century. I will never forget my New Testament professor’s notes, which were yellow with age. I enjoyed many members of my faculty, but in fact they were deeply rooted in the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, a World War I theologian, and did not relate me very well at all to the world I would have to engage in the 20th and now the 21st century. As I sought to find ways to do effective ministry in that world, my seminary clearly withdrew its support for me and my ministry. The Dean of my seminary now uses phrases like “progressive orthodoxy,” an oxymoron if I ever heard one. He also seems to deny that there is a statistical collapse in mainline churches today.
Denominational schools will only very rarely be radical centers of theological learning, for they live under the threat of the ecclesiastical hierarchies whom they serve and some well-heeled and, therefore, presumably, not intellectually radical contributors.
If I were going to seminary today, I would look first to ecumenical centers like Union Seminary in New York City, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. I would plan to supplement that seminary’s education with active participation in a congregation that understood the meaning of modern ministry. Short of that I would go to one of the Consortium Centers, where the Consortium actually functions and is not just a theory. The best of these, in my opinion, is the Consortium around the University of California, where the individual denominational schools have pooled their libraries and cross referenced their courses in all the member schools. It is hard to confuse education with propaganda in such a place. Next in line among my preferences would be a theological school that is part of and is related to a University. The School of Religion at Drew University (a Methodist institution in Madison, New Jersey) is an excellent example. It is hard to hide inside religion when students and faculty both must interact daily with students and faculty in other parts of a university.
Having said all that, let me add that if I had my life to live over again, I am not sure if I would change much of anything about my life path. I would still want to be a priest and a theologian. I am grateful that my church chose me to be one of its bishops. I think it is a better church because it allowed and even encouraged some of us to roam the edges of our faith and I believe that in time the Episcopal Church, and even my seminary, will appreciate what they now think of as my controversial ministry. The day will come when the things I thought of as frontier issues will seem retrogressive not radical. Then I will be criticized, not for being too radical, but for not being radical enough! I have every reason to believe that the churches I served as rector and the diocese I served as a bishop already do that.
John Shelby Spong
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