Understanding Ireland’s Vote Approving Same-Sex Marriage

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 6 August 2015 1 Comments
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Question

I wanted to let you know how much your books and writings have meant to me over the years. I promised my mom, a very devout Catholic, on her death bed that I would not give up on God even though so much of what I have always been taught has been along the lines of fantastical stories that seemed so hard to swallow. Thinking, probing or studying has felt much like the scene from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy gets to peek behind the curtain at the Wizard…so disappointing! I am trying to give my children something they can cling to for hope in times of sadness or struggle in their lives, but they are now far too educated to take literal church teaching seriously. I believe the answers are unknowable, but I think that physicists are close to getting a glimpse and I think you too, are on the right track and to borrow a biblical metaphor, I see you as a courageous voice of truth in the wilderness. Keep on keeping on.

Answer

Dear Dan,

Thank you for your letter and your encouragement. It seems to be easy for many people to suspend rationality and never to question traditional religious answers that have come down to us over the centuries. Yet these answers came from a world which thought that the universe was a three-tiered structure with the earth at its center, that God literally lived above the sky and that the category of the miraculous explained everything that they did not otherwise know how to process.

It also seems, on the other hand, to be easy for citizens of this 21st century, who do embrace the vastness of the universe and who would never use “miracle” as an explanatory concept for what they do not understand, to abandon all aspects of religion as something of a medieval hangover. That takes no great intellectual effort.

What is not easy, however, is to seek to bring these two worlds together. To see literalism as a false way of explaining the inexplicable, but not to reject the reality to which the literal words of religion point -- sometimes ineptly and inadequately. My religious critics accuse me of abandoning every precept of what they call “traditional” Christianity because I see all religious words as symbols, not as stated, rational truths. My secular friends accuse me of clinging to my religious past long after it has lost all its meaning and relevance. My own self-understanding is that both of these charges only serve to make me who I am: A believing Christian who is deeply invested in the 21st century.

I intend to be a citizen of and a participant in the world in which I live, but I am still convinced that behind and beyond the religious symbols of the ages, there is a reality to which these symbols point. I will not rest until I have been able to put these two things together. I am glad to have people like you sharing in the struggle and encouraging its continuation.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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