Bishop John Spong has a newsletter you can subscribe to. It's $9.95 for three months. My friend Ralph passes it along when it's a good one. This is a good one:
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Larry Hester from Denver writes:
You recently suggested that the split in Christianity today is
between those who assert yesterday's religious explanations and
those who find no meaning in yesterday's religious explanations and
give up on religion altogether. If that is so, is Christopher
Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great, a message from the religiously
disillusioned? If so how do those religious people who defend the
past deal with that book?
SPONG responds:
Dear Larry,
If I understand your question correctly, let me begin with three
declarative statements:
1. Religion must always be questioned
2. Theism can be abandoned without abandoning God
3. Christopher Hitchens' book is a real asset to the current debate.
Now just let me put some flesh on each of those statements.
Since human beings are creatures of both time and space, and since
we know from the work of Albert Einstein that time and space are
relative categories that expand and contract in relation to each
other, then we must conclude that any statement made by anyone, who
is bound by time and space, will never be absolute. There are no
propositional statements, secular or religious, that are exempt
from this principle. Words reduce all human experiences to
relativity. That is why every religious formula must be questioned;
that is why no word of any book is inerrant; that is why no
proclamation of any ecclesiastical leader is infallible; and
finally, that is why no religious system or institution can ever
claim to possess the true faith. Religion is a journey into the
mystery of God. It is not a system of beliefs and creeds and when
it becomes that, it always becomes idolatrous and begins to die.
Theism is not God. It is a human definition of God that assumes
that God is a being, perhaps the "Supreme Being," supernatural in
power, dwelling outside the world (usually thought of as above the
sky), who periodically invades the world in miraculous ways to
answer human prayers or to effect the divine will.
It is my sense that this definition of God has been mortally
wounded by the successive blows of Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac
Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, just to name a few. I
do not believe, however, that this means that God has been mortally
wounded even if the theistic definition of God has been.
Suppose God is not defined as "a being," but is simply experienced
as a power, a presence. Then describing that experience is quite
different from claiming to know who or what God is. Then the
question is, "Are we delusional or is this experience real?" I
think God is real and I believe we are in the process of defining
our God experience in a new way that will replace the dying
theistic definition of the past.
Finally, Christopher Hitchens' book, God Is Not Great, is a
description of the theistic God of the past who is dying. The
theistic God certainly appears in the Bible and is guilty of many
things that are genuinely immoral, like killing the firstborn male
in every Egyptian household, stopping the sun in the sky to allow
more time for Joshua to slaughter the Amorites and ordering
genocide against the Amalekites through the prophet Samuel.
Christians need to remember that it has been the theistic God who
has been responsible for the development of such things as anti-
Semitism, the Inquisition, and the oppression of people of color,
women and homosexual persons. This deity has also been perceived
as justifying war, fighting crusades and creating slavery. Let us
agree with Christopher Hitchens that this God is not great. We need
to challenge Christopher Hitchens' assumption, however, that this
is the only way we can think about or conceptualize God.
I think of the God experience as the power of life, love and being
flowing through the universe and coming to consciousness in human
self-awareness alone. I therefore feel that by living fully, loving
wastefully and being all that I can be I can make the God
experience visible. I also believe that it is my Christian vocation
to build a world where all people have a better chance to live,
love and to be. It is when I do these two things, I believe, that I
am engaging in the essence of worship.
- John Shelby Spong
