Charting a New Reformation, Part I – The Background

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 3 December 2015 12 Comments
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Question

I read with interest the letter from John Nelson about finding a way to plan a funeral so that it does not drift into unintelligible piety and mediaeval imagery. Thank you for your kind pastoral advice.

My wife of nearly fifty years, the only girl ever in my life, died quite suddenly last Easter Day after three weeks in the hospital following a single dose of chemotherapy. On her deathbed she was terrified that she was destined for hell. I am sure that this belief originated in the sermons she heard fifty years earlier in one of London’s most prestigious evangelical churches. Fear and hell and simultaneously fear of what she might experience in an afterlife, emanated from that distorted picture of the divine.

An Anglican priest, who knew her well, constructed a service which reflected her life in contemporary words and poetry which spoke to the heart of who she was, simply a kind woman whose self-image failed to recognize how rare and how wonderful that characteristic is. Two other priests, who also knew and understood her, participated in the service. I appreciate that I am lucky to know such sensitive and understanding clerics and would add to your advice just that. John and his wife should try when the time comes to have his or her funeral service conducted by people who know the deceased. It makes such a difference to the survivor.

I admire their planning. I wish we had planned more seriously earlier. My wife as she lay there did issue a number of instructions – no photograph, no eulogy and so on. But apart from that we had never really discussed what she would like. But maybe in the end the service is far more for those who are left behind than for those who are gone.

Kindest regards and infinite gratitude for your ministry in combating that authoritarian and harsh picture of the divine.

Answer

Dear Arthur,

Thank you for your kind and sensitive letter. I hope John Nelson, the author of the letter to this column to which you refer, will be able to read your words through this column. So will all those who face the same issues that you and your wife faced.

One does not intend to express hostility toward our brothers and sisters in Christ who have, through the literalization of religious symbols, turned Christianity away from a faith designed to expand consciousness, to increase love and to enhance life, into being the dispenser of guilt and fear. The fact remains that religion no matter how sincere can still be horribly wrong. The religion of the Christ, which has been used over the centuries to control behavior, is responsible for great human evil. It has portrayed God as a fierce judge or as a punishing parent. It has insulted our humanity with tales of the hopelessness of our fallen state. It has lowered our sense of self-worth. It has reduced us to slaves, beggars and petitioners for mercy. It has threatened us with the devil, who is about to get us and with the fires of hell that will consume us. It has portrayed God as a bloodthirsty one whose offended righteousness will not be satisfied without a blood offering or a human sacrifice. One wonders what has happened to the Jesus who was reported to have said: “Come unto me all ye that travail and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” Or the Jesus to whom John attributes the words: “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

To be critical of this negative religious mentality is not to be religiously intolerant, it is to push back the religious darkness that threatens to consume our faith tradition. Through the centuries, the Bible has been used to justify anti-Semitism and the Crusades in which we Christians defined Muslims as “infidels” worthy only of being killed. It has been used to justify slavery, segregation, apartheid and racial prejudice. It has been used to diminish women and to make them feel that their presumed and male-imposed identity as second-class human beings is God-given and therefore must be not just correct, but true. It has been used to justify homophobia, to make war and suffering look like virtues and quite literally, as you suggest in your wife’s case, to fill people not with the love of God, but with the fear of God.

Your letter raises that negativity to consciousness and hopefully frees us to challenge it openly. I am pleased that your previous contacts with the Anglican Church have introduced you to clerics about whom you speak so lovingly. As you are aware, I know one of them; he is Peter Francis, the warden of St. Deiniol’s Conference Center, now known as the Gladstone Library, located in Hawarden, Wales. He is one of the finest human beings, as well as one of the finest priests, I have ever known. His grace has blessed not only your life and that of your late wife, but my wife’s life and mine as well, to say nothing of countless others. I am glad that you are among that host.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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