In light of the recent publication of John Shelby Spong‘s Jesus for the Non-Religious, I thought it might be fruitful to revisit some of the debates which Spong’s work has provoked. I’m not interested in those detractors who take issue with Spong and base their concerns solely on the ground that he contradicts either scripture or tradition. Those are non–arguments that merely reiterate the very assertions which Spong challenges. Instead, I’m interested in those detractors who give independent reasons for their concerns. It seems pointless to address critics unless you address the very best among them.
In 2001, Spong went on tour through Australia and New Zealand. His presence seems to have created quite a stir and one consequence was that some reflections found their way into the February 2002 issue of Pacifica, an Australasian theological journal. The articles are: “God Beyond Theism? Bishop Spong, Paul Tillich and the Unicorn” by Gregory W. Dawes; and “Assessing the Spong Phenomenon,” by Nigel Watson. Both articles provide solid critiques which serve as a good corrective before we encounter Spong’s latest work.
On the up side, both articles acknowledge the importance of Spong’s role as communicator. Spong is not an academic. Instead, he writes to bridge a gulf that exists between the long–standing assumptions of academic theology and the world–view enjoyed by the average person sitting in a pew. This is a familiar narrative. Spong tells it himself at the beginning of his New Christianity for a New World. It is almost a queer narrative—a conspiracy of silence that compels the practical theologian to suppress what she knows to be true, hiding from the pastoral charge the true nature of her identity—namely a thinking clergy deliberately trained by the seminary to ask difficult questions.
This is a much older narrative than we care to admit. Nigel Watson brings this to the fore by citing the introduction to Denis Nineham’s 1963 commentary on the Gospel of Mark: “The reader is reminded that what may seem new, and somewhat startling, to him has been fully recognized by professional students of the New Testament for many years. Many of the Christian leaders of today are men who have long been well aware of these questions, and a lively debate about the theological implications of them has been in progress for some time.” I add only that this phenomenon is not restricted to liberal seminaries. I have just completed another course in Hellenistic Greek led by an instructor who practices text critical method under the auspices of the Toronto School of Theology’s most conservative college. This is important to note: not even conservative evangelical theologians in the academy dispute Spong’s biblical claims.
Both articles also convey enormous personal respect for Spong. Watson writes: “Spong also gives the impression of being an essentially good person, a person of integrity, courage and compassion. It is not difficult to think of prominent persons in church and state in recent years who have been found to have feet of clay. Spong seems to be free of all that. And anyone who is labeled by the Klu-Klux-Klan as “Public Enemy No. 1″ must have something going for him.”
Now for the down side. Dawes takes issue with Spong’s treatment of theism, arguing that if we pursue it to its logical conclusion, then we must opt for either a weak atheism or a strong agnosticism. There is no coherent way to articulate a weak theism such as Spong’s that doesn’t collapse. In fact, Spong has heard this argument on many occasions. But an article by Andrew Brown which appeared in the New York Times on April 6, 2006 gave Spong occasion to address it directly in Jesus for the Non–Religious: “The word ”atheist” … does not mean, as people commonly assume, one who asserts that there is no such thing as God. It means, rather, that one rejects the theistic definition of God. It is quite possible, therefore, to reject theism without rejecting God…. I am a God-intoxicated human being, but I can no longer define my God experience inside the boundaries of a theistic definition of God” (214). Curiously, Spong relies upon the work of Michael Goulder, New Testament scholar turned atheist.
Dawes takes the more challenging path, directing his attention to Paul Tillich, whose work provides a surer footing for the notion of a god without theism, looking in particular at his Courage To Be and the first volume of his Systematics. The merit of Tillich is a greater precision of language which bears closer philosophical scrutiny. Tillich intuits (?) the existence of an unconditioned reality which precedes our experience of the division of knowing subject from known object. As spiritual people, it is our life’s quest to move to this union of subject and object. We might call this reality “transcendental” where we find the ideals of truth, beauty, goodness and justice. At this point, I think of Paul: “For now I see as through a glass darkly; then, face to face.” We attain to this reality through revelatory experience, including states of “ecstasy” “in which reason is beyond itself, that is, beyond its subject–object structure.” This reality is the “Ground of Being” or “being itself.” Dawes traces Tillich and Spong to the tradition (from Kant) that infers God from the existence of transcendental ideals.
Dawes offers a twofold objection to the notion of “being itself.” First, drawing on Kant, the word “being” is not descriptive. This introduces the example which gives his article its title: you take nothing away from the idea of a unicorn by announcing that a unicorn doesn’t exist. Neither being nor not-being is necessary to the concept of a unicorn. Moreover, we cannot speak intelligibly of being as a universal quality available in the air—”being itself.” Second, the word god (Spong’s alternative to “being itself”) seems pointless here, since no creative power is ascribed to “being itself.” The universe did not arise from “being itself” but merely is. As explanation, science renders redundant the notion of god the creator. As description, Tillich’s mysticism suggests that any name will do. Dawes concludes that the language of god has “been emptied of its content and stripped of its necessity.”
Nigel Watson approaches his critique as a survey of several big ideas, and so the issue of theism receives a relatively brief treatment. In essence, his argument is this: N.T. Wright and Keith Ward espouse a notion of god which is similar to Spong’s. Both men still identify as theists. Therefore, Spong should too. Pretty weak reasoning.
Stronger, though, is his observation that Spong tends to create false either / ors by oversimplifying the issues he confronts. For example, in addressing the notion of Jesus as rescuer, Spong attacks the penal substitutionary theory of atonement. (See my earlier post on atonement.) While this theory is the dominant American understanding of why Jesus died on the cross, nevertheless it is not the only theory, and Spong should not dismiss all such theories by allowing the “atonement” category to bear the weight of the sins of a few suspect theologians.
What are we to make of Spong’s latest offering—Jesus for the Non-Religious? This book flows from a natural progression of ideas. If god is no longer an external being set over and against the universe, if God is merely a human creation, then it follows that the divinity which we have ascribed to Jesus is no longer a divinity apart from ourselves and is likewise a human creation. Strictly speaking, without a divinely appointed salvific role, Jesus can no longer be called the Christ. Understandably, this raises the semantic question: how can a person describe himself as christian if he no longer believes in Jesus as the Christ? That is the anxiety which underlies Spong’s new book. Spong seeks to wrest the label christian from the exclusive hold of those whose view of Jesus demands divinity. Perhaps Spong’s tactic is not so much to deny the divinity of Jesus as to affirm the divinity of all the rest of us—a reasonably noble project.
Thus far I don’t find myself particularly bothered by Spong’s project. I am troubled neither by his views on god nor by their consequences for the meaning of Christ. However, I do pause when I consider his method, which raises a serious contradiction in his views on the function of church. Much of Spong’s work is motivated by a sense of injustice. Traditional belief in god and in Jesus as Christ has been manipulated by men to perpetrate atrocities against others (which suggests we need more women doing christian theology). The issue is power. Historically, those who held the power to interpret scripture and tradition also held the power to impose the dictates of such interpretation. Thanks to the separation of church and state, this is no longer the case. Nevertheless, recent suffering in Iraq illustrates the dangers which arise when a theological illiterate holds enormous political and military power. Spong asserts that the source of such abuse is a literal interpretation of scripture and a doctrinal rigidity that loses its connection to a grounded ethic. But Spong then faces the charge that he is supplanting one literal interpretation for another. See, for example, Emmanuel principal Peter Wyatt’s editorial in the United Church Observer [link no longer exists].
There is a short answer to Wyatt’s charge. There is no such thing as a literal interpretation. The phrase “literal interpretation” is an oxymoron. An interpretation is, by definition, not literal. In fact, the instant we become cognizant of something, it is subject to our interpretation; dispassionate observation is impossible. I recall another Emmanuel professor’s observation that we liberals tend to overestimate the extent to which fundamentalists engage in literalism. The converse is also true, certainly within the progressive camp: we tend to overestimate our own capacity to arrive at a nuanced interpretation.
But as I’ve suggested, the issue isn’t literalism; it’s power. Interpretation becomes skewed by the will to power. No. Spong isn’t a megalomaniacal character hell bent on ruling the world like the Brain of Pinky and the Brain. But he certainly wants to persuade us, and it isn’t always possible to accept his assertions based solely on the evidence he presents. Most obvious is his assertion—already discussed—that god is best understood as “being itself.” Since this appears to be revelatory knowledge, trying to persuade us of it is nonsensical. Jesus for the Non-Religious is full of such assertions. One of the most fully developed is what I call Spong’s “grand narrative of life” beginning on page 215 and continuing for several pages. It traces the course of our universe from big bang through the rise of self-awareness to the creation of god to alleviate our overwhelming existential angst. While this is as plausible a story as any other, it is, after all, just another human construction and just as vulnerable as the genesis account. As long as Spong asserts alternatives, he commits the very sins he eschews. He styles himself an interpretive authority and demands, however politely, that we defer to his expertise. He would be on firmer ground merely telling us how to do our theology without insisting that we arrive at his conclusions.
Behind his writing is a great irony. Spong stands in a tradition that meanders its way back through Tillich to the German Romantics. It is very much rooted in an old-world view of our place in the order of things. And yet Spong positions himself as a mediator between the academy and the parishioner. Sadly, the parishioner continues to be kept out of the loop. The theological advances which Spong translates into the language of the laity are 65 years old and gathering dust on the book shelves. In the meantime, theologies of liberation have arisen and declined and are witnessing a resurgence, (postmodern) critical studies have gained a respectability in mainstream (academic) thinking, and queer analysis is only beginning to flower. Will we have to wait another 65 years before these strands of thought make their way into the pews?