John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or
Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile: A New Reformation of the
Church's Faith and Practice. HarperSanFrancisco [sic]1998.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
In
his great nineteenth century polemic Some Mistakes of Moses
Colonel Ingersoll anticipated the day when ministers of the Christian
denominations would be freed up to speak their minds.
They should no longer be chained and tied to confessions of faith, to
mouldy books and musty creeds.... As we become more civilized, more and
more liberty will be accorded to these men, until finally ministers will
give their best and highest thoughts. The congregations will finally get
tired of hearing about the patriarchs and saints, the miracles and
wonders, and will insist upon knowing something about the men and women
of our day, and the accomplishments and discoveries of our time.
That's Bishop Spong. And he has suffered exactly the reprisals Ingersoll
predicted he would have to suffer: "the priests... will not allow the
people to change; and when, after a time, the priests, having
intellectually advanced, wish to take a step in the direction of
progress, the people will not allow them to change. At first, the rabble
are enslaved by the priests, and afterwards the rabble become the
masters." Even so, in this fascinating page-turner of pastoral theology,
Bishop Spong recounts the less-than-enthusiastic response his long years
of liberalizing the faith have sometimes garnered. One shocking tale
recalls how at the funeral of his first wife, as the bishop knelt in
meditation by her casket, a little old church lady suddenly loomed over
him and whacked him across the shoulders with her umbrella, spitting,
"You son of a bitch!" As she left, she cackled how she'd been waiting to
make her theological statement for years and was glad to have the chance
at last!
But the vitriolic reactions have been more than outweighed by the
gratitude borne by many who have found Bishop Spong's quest for a modern
Christianity much to their souls' liking. Like Bultmann and Bishop
Robinson before him, Spong has assured them that it is possible to
retain Christian faith and yet think freely in the world of scientific
modernity. But is it? In Why Christianity Must Change or Die, the
bishop systematically dismantles the incredible creed of Christian
traditionalism, with as little reverence as he admits it deserves. His
proposed reformation is largely devoted to theological ground-clearing.
His new Christianity is admittedly still vague and hard to see in the
millennium-eve darkness. But Spong presents the basic ingredients of a
recipe. It boils down to three main elements. First, he rejects theism
in favor of a more philosophical Tillichian understanding of a divine
Ground of Being. Second, he advocates Whiteheadian Process Theology (an
impersonal but evolving God-analogue), which makes creative
transformation the raison d'ętre of all existence. Third, the Christian
brand name is to be secured by the retention of Jesus as role model.
None of this is particularly new; indeed it strikes me as ironic how
Bishop Spong largely asks us to look not forward into the millennial
future but rather backward into the textbook of the theological past.
The Ground of Being notion is, as Tillich always readily admitted, no
new idea but comes directly from medieval Christian mysticism and
philosophy. The antiquity of the idea by no means counts against it. The
problem in making it the foundation stone for a 2001 theological odyssey
is rather the untenable metaphysics, the Logocentrism if you will. Isn't
it the hypostatization fallacy to make an abstraction like "Being" into
an ontological entity? ("Maam, the reason your boy's out setting fires
and slashing tires is, he's got a case of Juvenile Delinquency!") Some
might think the resulting essentialism incompatible with Process
thought, which holds there is only becoming, never static being. You
wouldn't expect to find "Ground of Being" talk in Process Theology, and
one suspects the two appear cheek by jowl here because they both appear
in the oeuvre of John A.T. Robinson (a revered mentor of Spong), the
Ground of Being in the earlier Honest to God and Process Theology
in the later In the Beginning God and The Human Face of God.
But I suppose one can harmonize the two if one wishes by equating the
divine ground with Whitehead's "primordial" nature of God as opposed to
his "consequent" nature of God. (Or should the quote marks be around the
word "God"?)
Ingersoll poked fun at those clergy who in his day sought to salvage the
tale of Joshua stopping the "orbit" of the sun. They couldn't very well
deny heliocentricity, so they claimed God altered the refractive index
of the atmosphere in order to extend the daylight for Joshua's benefit!
That way one might seem to save the appearances, though Ingersoll showed
how implausible a dodge it was (still is--apologists still use it!). I
want to suggest that what Bishop Spong and Tillich were doing with the
conceptual legerdemain of Process thought and the Ground of Being is
pretty much the same schtick. The thought of God's personality now
sounds to them as crudely mythical as the earth-orbiting sun, but what
they propose in its place is as much a verbal obfuscation as Joshua's
Daylight Savings Time.
The third strand in Spong's threefold cord is the most surprising, given
his forthright advocacy of critical biblical scholarship in such books
as his Liberating the Gospels. For in Why Christianity Must
Change or Die he makes another move typical of earlier generations
of ostensibly critical Anglican scholars: having demonstrated how
thoroughly unbiographical, unhistorical, the gospels are, he goes on to
treat them as if they were true likenesses of Jesus after all. The
assumption seems to be that even though the material is all legendary,
secondary, history spins only certain types of legends about certain
types of people. So Jesus must have been the kind of person the gospel
texts make him. This sort of conclusion renders the whole critical
enterprise superfluous. But it is rather the conclusion that is
superfluous, since one silently selects only those texts that fit one's
theological agenda. Whence came all the other texts, like those which
presuppose Jesus as a dogmatic megalomaniac boasting of his own divinity
and damning his opponents to perdition? Why mustn't the historical Jesus
have been like that? Fundamentalist apologists like N.T. Wright think he
was, with justification equal to Spong's. It is surely an odd procedure
first to deny the value of all the evidence and then to use it anyway.
That is to treat the gospels like the Shroud of Turin: okay it's a
forgery, but let's still think of Jesus as looking that way. But it is
typical of "reasonable" Anglican biblical scholarship.
It is the bishop's goal, like that of Jesus in Mark 5:24-34, to stop the
hemorrhaging, in this case, the mass exodus of Christians from the Good
Ship Lollipop and into what Spong calls "the church alumni society." But
one must needs ask why the bishop himself has not become Director of
Alumni Affairs? It is not that he knows where his eucharistic bread is
buttered, for no one can charge John Spong with not speaking his mind
fearlessly. But is he perhaps a practitioner of what fellow Anglican
priest Don Cupitt calls a theology of nostalgia? (And is not Cupitt
himself another?) In a striking phrase, Cupitt says "traditional
Christianity is our Old Testament," implying he himself is heralding,
midwifing, a new Joachite Age of the Spirit, against which Christianity
as we have known it must be regarded as a mere cocoon. Spong seems to
share this assumption. But if so, then we ought not blind ourselves to
the fact that for Christianity to change on such a scale, and for it to
die--are one and the same thing. One may then piously keep vigil for its
resurrection, but Cupitt and Spong are sophisticated enough to know
resurrections do not happen. They are part of that outworn chrysalis.
And yet I think we can speak of a kind of afterlife for Christianity. We
need to seek after a different set of analogies. I will borrow a few
from the world of television.
Christianity is already dead, or better, cancelled. But it lives on in
syndication--reruns! And, stale as it is (how many Advent seasons can
you pretend you are "preparing for Jesus' coming into the world"?),
there will always be people who cannot seem to get enough of the same
old episodes (read: gospel lectionary readings, Easter celebrations).
They are like incurable fans of The Honeymooners and The Mary
Tyler Moore Show. "Oh boy, it's the Chuckles the Clown episode!" In
short, Christianity as Nick at Nite.
But sometimes a canceled series is able to pass on some of its DNA to a
spin-off. They canceled Mary Tyler Moore, but then Lou Grant
premiered. They canceled Cheers, but now Frazier is going
great guns. Christianity has this sort of afterlife (or, better,
half-life) insofar as it has spun off successful series like Mormonism,
Urantia, the Summit Lighthouse, and the Unification Church. Soon
some of these may rival the best ratings of the original.
Other canceled series are not blessed to be thus reincarnated. Some
shows survive only in the nominal sense that animal corpses provide
carrion nutrient for jackals. Think of M*A*S*H. Okay, it did
beget a spin-off, Trapper John. But the title character wasn't
even played by the same actor. The real "survival" of M*A*S*H was
in the form of a series of Xerox commercials where they reassembled the
whole cast (aside from Alan Alda, who presumably had better gigs
awaiting him) as a bunch of white-coated technos of some sort praising
the merits of photocopiers. No sooner did Seinfeld cancel itself than
one of its most hilarious characters, shyster-lawyer Jackie Childs,
began appearing in the unlikely medium of minivan commercials. But where
is the analogy to canceled Christianity in all of this? Dead as a
religion, Christianity has bled its decaying mythemes into the
intestines of popular culture, where the scraps of Norse and Greek
mythology have long been assimilated into pop culture entertainments
like Hercules movies and TV shows and Marvel Comics' The Mighty Thor.
In fact, I dare say, thanks to Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the Norse
thunder god has more devotees today than he did during the heyday of
living Norse religion! Egyptian religion, too, hangs on in ghostly form
in mummy movies and cartoons.
In precisely the same way, many Christian mythemes have made a triumphal
entry into the world of pop entertainment. For those who prefer
sentimentality, there is the cloying providentialism of Touched by an
Angel and Highway to Heaven. The old myth of angelic
"Watchers" who fell for the fetching charms of mortal women is reflected
in modern fictions like the Nicholas Cage movie City of Angels
and Christopher Walken's and Jennifer Beal's Prophecy II, not to
mention the JLA comics miniseries "Paradise Lost," in which the guardian
angel Zauriel abandons heavenly immortality out of love for his
attractive mortal charge. The same JLA series makes brilliant use of
straight biblical apocalyptic, when we behold the Green Lantern, the
Martian Manhunter, and Superman trading punches with gigantic angels
with bull- and eagle-heads and bristling golden wings. Apocalyptic
Armageddon provided the fuel for the late, lamented dramatic FOX series
Millennium, as well as the effective Omen series and the
Gnostic horror movie Prophecy. And needless to say, the central
Christian myth of a suffering redeemer has not waited till now to spawn
innumerable "Christ figures," from Billy Budd to the Silver
Surfer.
Some popular fiction, like that of Shakespeare and Dickens, is
eventually recognized as great literature, while other pop fictions form
a museum of curiosities. Some of the examples just mentioned may one day
be relegated to either category. But for my money, all of them have made
attractive new use of the mythemes in question. Their assimilation to
the form of superhero graphic art and fantasy film serves to
defamiliarize them and to fire the imagination anew. The same myths and
symbols had become moribund through the impossible demands of orthodox
religion that we must believe them. To invoke the shade of Ingersoll one
last time,
These myths, though false, are beautiful [or at least, we might say,
fascinating], and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the
heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these
things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment
will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all
the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful
thing to every brave and thoughtful man.
This, I think, explains the defensive fear of many Unitarians and
secularists in the face of myth. Similarly, liberal Christian apologists
like Bishop Spong are, I think, misguided when they try to save their
religion by ejecting from it the attendant myths. It is the religion
which has perished, its stink well evident ("Him who has a nose, let him
smell."). And it is the myths as myths that are worth saving. There is
some confusion here as to which is the baby, which the bathwater.
Christianity is dead. But its myths may yet live. Like Southeast
European republics that emerged, eyes blinking from the unaccustomed
sunlight, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the biblical myths may
find a new lease on life in the wake of the death of the religion that
for so long conscripted them.