Responding to Bishop Spong’s 12 Principles and the Future of Religion
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 6 October 2016 18 Comments
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Dear Faithful Readers: Bishop Spong is now home in New Jersey and continues to recuperate from his stroke. Until he is back to his writing we will continue to publish Weekly Essays, some from his treasure trove of past essays and some from guest authors. This week we are pleased to offer you this article from the Rev. Matthew Fox. Responding to Bishop Spong’s 12 Principles and the Future of Religion
Hearing you in public and reading your wisdom inspires me to reconsider my Christian upbringing in a more progressive way, thank you.
The Cross, an instrument of death, repels me as a barbaric way to symbolize Christianity. Were a modern day Jesus or a female equivalent to die from gunfire, would it be appropriate for the resulting places of worship to feature guns on top of their buildings, for religious leaders to wear guns around their neck, for the guns to be featured in earrings and other accessories, all for honoring the new messiah?
Dear Barry,
You ask a good question in a very provocative way. It rises, however, out of a much distorted version of Christianity that originated not with Jesus, but in the 4th century of Christian history when the church entered a period of focusing on sin and guilt that still characterizes Christianity to this day. It is a focus that I think will be the death of Christianity unless it is challenged, uprooted and removed. It is focused in that pious “mantra” that “Jesus died for my sins.” Since that death was on a cross, the instrument of death has become the symbol of salvation. So it appears on the steeples of our churches, is worn around our necks, as earrings and is stamped on the front of Bibles. I do not want to remove it. I want only to transform it from the definition of sin and guilt to an image of what it means to give one’s life away in love for another. Let me explain.
The 4th century, the century in which the creeds were adopted and Christianity was set on its historical path, was dominated theologically by a man named Augustine, who was the bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He was a convert to Christianity from a religion called Manichaeism, which was dualistic in nature, dividing the world into good and evil, heaven and earth, body and soul, flesh and spirit.
Augustine was obsessed with sin and he reveals this in his autobiographical work entitled The Confessions of St. Augustine. He described his will as being oriented toward the gratification of the flesh. He found himself incapable of not “falling into sin” and he prayed to be delivered from his obsession with evil.
Reading the book of Genesis, he put his experience into that ancient Hebrew myth of the seven-day creation and its perfection in chapter one of Genesis and the expulsion of the human family from the Garden of Eden in chapter two of Genesis, building his theology on the juxtaposition of those two narratives. He thought, mistakenly, we now know, that Genesis, chapters one and two, were sequential chapters in a book that he was convinced that God had dictated. So he postulated an original perfection for human life, followed by a cosmic fall into what came to be called “original sin.” So he saw all life as “fallen,” sinful and incapable of being restored to the perfection for which we had been created.
Given this diagnosis, he went on to prescribe the cure. Jesus was God’s rescue operation, designed to save us from the sin of the fall. The way we were saved was that God punished Jesus for our sins. So the justice of God was satisfied and the fall of human life was overcome in the story of salvation. Jesus was the savior and the cross was the symbol of that redemptive act. The cross, therefore, became the identifying symbol of Christianity itself. I regard this as a barbaric way to describe the Christian story. It gives us first a God, who cannot forgive and second a deity, who requires a human sacrifice or a blood offering before forgiveness becomes appropriate. Such a deity seems to me to be a monster. It then requires a Jesus who enjoys suffering, who is eager to mount his cross to die. Perhaps Jesus is a masochist, who enjoys suffering. Finally, it presents human life as guilt-laden and evil for it was our sins that caused God to punish Jesus on the cross.
The best thing I can tell you about this theology is that it is simply not so, it is not biblical, it is not Christianity. There was no original perfection. We who live on the other side of Charles Darwin now know that life emerged on this planet about 3.8 billion years ago in the form of a single cell. We did not begin, even metaphorically, as a perfect man and a perfect woman in the Garden of Eden. From that single cell of life, we journeyed through a series of stages from single cells to cell clusters to a division between animate life and inanimate life to the appearance of primitive consciousness on the animate side of life and finally to self-consciousness and the rise of authentic human life, a stage that may be as recent as 250,000 years ago.
There was no original perfection. Since there was no original perfection, there could not have been a fall into “original sin.” One cannot “fall” from a status one never possessed. If there was no fall, there could not have been a rescue. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened, nor can one be restored to a status one has never possessed. So this understanding of the place of the cross in the Christian story is not only crude, but also nonsensical. Indeed, it is simply wrong.
So, if we are not fallen sinners, who need to be saved, then what are we? We are incomplete people, who yearn to be made whole and complete. Salvation is thus not to be rescued from sin, but to be empowered to become more deeply and fully human. In the insecure status of our historic struggle to survive within the evolutionary process, our own survival became the dominant human drive. If my survival is my highest value, I will view anything and everyone through that lens. All things will be subordinated to my need to survive. The result will be a radically self-centered creature. Salvation in that scenario would be the freedom to transcend this biological drive to achieve survival and in the process free me to be able to give my life away in love for another. That is what the cross stands for to me and that is why I honor the cross and do not want it to be removed from its central place in Christianity. I seek rather to make this transformed meaning that which is central to Christianity.
So I wear a cross and I seek to live out a Christianity based on a humanity that can transcend the survival nature of our own biology, a humanity that reveals the freedom to love someone else more than I love myself. That to me is to experience the presence of God. That is why I join Paul in saying: “Yes, God was in Christ.” We see God when love calls us into the fullness of life.
Thanks for your question. I hope this helps.
John Shelby Spong
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