John Shelby Spong
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The Right Reverend Doctor John Shelby Spong is the retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark (based in Newark, New Jersey). He served in this role from June 12, 1976 until his retirement in 2000. He was born on June 16, 1931 in Charlotte, North Carolina, educated in the public schools of Charlotte, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina in 1952, and received his Master of Divinity degree in 1955 from the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia. That seminary and Saint Paul's College have both conferred on him honorary Doctor of Divinity degrees. He served as rector of St. Joseph's Church in Durham, North Carolina from 1955 to 1957; rector of Calvary Parish, Tarboro, North Carolina from 1957 to 1965; rector of St. John's Church in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1965 to 1969; and rector of St. Paul's Church in Richmond, Virginia from 1969 to 1976.
One prominent theme in Spong's writing is the need to rethink the basic ideas of Christianity to make them consistent with a postmodern understanding of the universe. He believes that theism has lost credibility as a valid conception of God's nature, preferring something more akin to panentheism. He identifies himself as a Christian because he believes that Jesus fully expressed God's presence and that Jesus was resurrected by God to "God's right hand," and that this is the meaning of the early Christian slogan of "Jesus is Lord" (Spong, 1994 and Spong, 1991). He rejects the historical truth of some Christian doctrines, such as the virgin birth (Spong, 1992) and the bodily resurrection of Jesus that he claims would define the resurrection as the literal resuscitation of the corpse of Jesus (Spong, 1994).
Spong's writings rely on biblical sources and are influenced by modern critical analysis of the biblical sources (especially Spong, 1991).
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New Reformation
He has also been a strong proponent of feminism and gay rights within both the church and society at large. Towards these ends, he calls for a new Reformation, in which many of Christianity's basic doctrines should be reformulated. These beliefs are most fully outlined in his book A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born. He briefly outlines these beliefs on his web site as follows:
Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity in The Voice. I will post my theses on the Internet and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognized Christian leaders of the world. My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:
1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.
Jerry Falwell
Spong has been outspoken in his criticism of the conservative fundamentalist preaching of Reverend Jerry Falwell who he claims "was a race baiting segregationist to his core... (who) praised the apartheid regime in South Africa as a 'bulwark for Christian civilization [1] (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0MKY/is_15_28/ai_n6260702)" before his rise to national prominence.
Criticisms
Spong is not without his critics. Many argue that a bishop who argues against church doctrines that he swore in his ordination vow to defend is lacking in integrity, especially as he continues to draw a salary from the church. These critics would argue that one can no more honestly claim to be a Christian while holding Spong's beliefs than claim to be a Marxist while espousing laissez-faire capitalist economic principles.
Critics also argue that Spong has simply decreed that miracles are impossible rather than providing a rational argument against them. For example, he simply decreed that theism was meaningless, rather than demonstrated that such a creator God doesn't exist. It must be noted however, that proving the non-existence of any claim is a difficult, if not insurmountable problem.
Gerald O’Collins, Professor of Fundamental Theology, Gregorian University, Rome argued that Spong’s "work simply does not belong to the world of international scholarship. No genuine scholar will be taken in by this book. ... What is said about a key verb St. Paul uses in Gal. 1:15f. shows that the bishop [Spong] has forgotten any Greek that he knew. [Spong argued his case based on a Greek word that is not even in this passage] ... [my] advice for his next book [which] is to let some real experts check it before publication." [Review of Resurrection: Myth or Reality, London Tablet, 30 April ]
Published books
- 1973 - Honest Prayer
- 1974 - This Hebrew Lord
- 1975 - Christpower
- 1975 - Dialogue: In Search of Jewish-Christian Understanding
- 1976 - Life Approaches Death: a Dialogue on Ethics in Medicine
- 1980 - The Easter Moment
- 1983 - Into the Whirlwind, the Future of the Church
- 1986 - Beyond Moralism, a Contemporary View of the Ten Commandments (co-authored with Denise G. Haines, Archdeacon)
- 1987 - Consciousness and Survival, an Interdisciplinary Inquiry into the possibility of Life Beyond Biological Death (Edited by John S. Spong, Introduction by John S. Spong.)
- 1988 - Living in Sin? A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality
- 1991 - Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture.
- 1992 - Born of a Woman, A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus
- 1994 - Resurrection: Myth or Reality? A Bishop's Search for the Origins of Christianity
- 1996 - Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes
- 1999 - Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile
- 2002 - A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith Is Dying and How a New Faith Is Being Born
- 2005 - The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love
External links
- Bishop Spong's A New Christianity for a New World (http://www.johnshelbyspong.com)
- Bishop Spong's Home Page (http://www.dioceseofnewark.org/jsspong/index.html)
- What's Wrong With Bishop Spong? (http://www.answersingenesis.org/Docs/1119.asp)
- Why Spong’s "Christianity" is already dead (http://www.tektonics.org/qt/spong01.html)