Charting the New Reformation, Part III – The Twelve Theses

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 17 December 2015 10 Comments
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Question

We met most recently in June 2015 in Windsor, UK, when I drove you and Christine from your nephew’s home to Holy Trinity Church. I asked you then if the writing of the book, entitled Walking My Path in the Way of the Mystics was in your mind when you wrote your book on John’s gospel.

Another question/suggestion: You demonstrate cogently the inadequacies of the first-century world view for present day Christians. Have you thought of sketching a more appropriate world view by taking the concepts, processes and key words of the present day scientific world view and suggesting what each might imply and call for, in spirit terms, in the daily living of those wanting to walk in the Way of (and, perhaps, with) Jesus? E.g. Miriam Winter in Paradoxology (Orbis 2009) uses such words as: chaos, consciousness, connectedness, coincidence, creation, celebration, relativity, uncertainty, probability, continuity, relationship, wholeness and transformation.

Answer

Dear Tom,

Thank you for your letter to my column and for your suggestions. I am honored that you spend your time and energy thinking of topics on which you think I should be writing. Unfortunately, that is not the way the writing genie operates.

I have now published twenty-six books. They all rose out of either my study life as a priest and later as a bishop or out of some experience I was having inside the institutional church as it sought to give leadership to the values of the world in which we were living. I think of the church’s role in the struggle for justice and equality for African-Americans, women and gay and lesbian people. In a sense each of my books laid the groundwork for the next. Never did I simply start in a new direction. I read deeply in the area of both Jewish and Christian mysticism before I wrote two books: Eternal Life: A New Vision and The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. I don’t see a further journey into that subject, much as I loved it.

I have two major writing projects lined up. I doubt if either will ever get developed into a book. I hope they will appear in my column on a week-to-week basis. To place either one of them into a book would be a five-year project. To place both of them into a book would be a ten-year project. To think that I might finish one or both of them in the time remaining to me in what William Shakespeare called “this mortal coil” is, I believe, to be unrealistic.

The first of these tentatively planned writing projects is entitled: Twelve Theses for the Continuing Reformation of Christianity. I may well deal with some of the subject matter mentioned in your second suggestion in that study. The second of my proposed writing projects is to sink myself into the gospel of Luke as deeply as I did into John, which preceded my book: The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic, or as deeply as I have done on the gospel of Matthew in preparation for my book which comes out next February under the title, Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy- A Journey into a New Christianity through the Doorway of Matthew’s Gospel. That project does not yet even have a tentative title.

Thank you for your letter and I hope to see you again in the fall of 2016 when I will once again do a lecture tour in the UK and Europe.

My best,
John Shelby Spong

 

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