Charting a New Reformation, Part XIX - The Fifth Thesis, Miracles (continued)

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 28 April 2016 17 Comments
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Question

It’s always a new pleasure and enrichment to read your weekly issues. If you’ll forgive my arrogance, I would like to make a suggestion, a tentative explanation of the unshakable conviction of so many people that there is an almighty theistic God outside our universe

It might be the vague recollection, an echo of the last weeks or months of our fetus life when our universe was limited to our mother’s placenta but with an acoustic system already operational and connected to our primitive brain. We heard the voice of our father coming from outside of this universe and many a time with a deep caring male voice. This recollection would be later incorporated in the baby after a couple of years when its unconscious mind would develop. Hence so many people will never accept to abandon their belief. I got this idea whilst reading (and translating into French at my favorite publisher’s request) the book of Aletha J. Solter, PhD, The Attachment Play, based on the behavior theory. She demonstrates in this book the fact that after the birth, the baby remembers sometimes for clearly a couple of years what happened before and during its birth! She used this remarkable memory of the early childhood to heal some children’s behavior problems.

My second point in this email concerns your Q&A, in your response to the question of Sue Stover. I recently read a book, which analyses many details that are quite familiar to you: The Yahweh vs. the Elohim traditions of the Old Testament. Its title is Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Elliott Friedman. It may contain some interesting hypotheses about this topic.

Answer

Dear Ray,

Thank you for your letter with your provocative insights. My readers need to know that I have had the chance to know you and to talk with you about these and many other things in the years of our friendship. They also need to know that you were the first translator of my books into French. You have always been a resource to my life and both Christine and I look forward to our opportunity to see you in Basel, Switzerland next October.

In regard to the comments and questions expressed in your letter, let me say that I am certain that there is something called “pre-birth memory.” Evidence for that seems well established. I am also convinced that there is something real about what Carl Jung called “the collective unconscious,” which looks at some other interconnections. I have not, however, read deeply enough on that subject to have formed sufficiently well-researched opinions that I would be comfortable sharing with others. In the field of theology we are oft times tempted to say more than we know and even to become dogmatic in the face of mystery. The Christian life, I remind myself daily, is a journey into a dimension of truth that no human mind can ever fully possess. So I have no great light that I want to flash before your fascinating suggestion that the idea of a theistic God is derived from the suggestion that an unborn child experiences his or her father first as a presence from a universe different from the one the fetus occupies. I find that suggestion intriguing, but not convincing. It seems to me that there are many sources of that idea, not just one. Above all I am convinced that every idea of God ultimately arises from a human experience, but that does not mean God is no more than a mythologized human experience. Over the years of human history every human definition of God has finally died, or been radically revised in the light of new knowledge and expanded human experience. So in my mind there is a reality to God that transcends every definition. God does not die when any human definition of God, like “theism” dies. I make a clear distinction between God and every human idea of God. So I will take your idea under advisement, just because it is your idea, and I will explore it further. Perhaps we can discuss it more in October. Until then we send you our best wishes.

John Shelby Spong

 

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17 thoughts on “Charting a New Reformation, Part XIX – The Fifth Thesis, Miracles (continued)

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