From the Australian Age newspaper:
John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopalian bishop who calls for a new Reformation of the Christian faith, was born in North Carolina in 1931. He was raised, he says, in a church that taught him blacks were inferior and that segregation was the will of God, that women were second-class and did not deserve equal rights within the church, that Jews were evil and responsible for killing Jesus and that homosexuals were either mentally sick or morally depraved. "I have spent my entire life getting out from under that upbringing," he says.
In 1948, he sought to involve young black Episcopalians at a youth convention and was over-ruled by his bishop. In the early '60s, his advocacy of racial integration resulted in him being declared Public Enemy Number One at a Ku Klux Klan rally. Asked if he has received death threats for championing the rights of women, homosexuals and blacks, he replies, "only sixteen". With just a trace of irony, he adds: "And not one of them has been from an atheist.They've all been from true
believers."
Spong, who is in Australia publicising his autobiography, Here I Stand, is a Christian who does not believe in lliteral interpretations of the Resurrection or the Virgin Birth, the cornerstones of his own religion. He is characterised by his enemies as a vapid liberal whose theology amounts to no religion at all and, earlier this month, Governor-General-designate and Anglican Bishop of Brisbane, Peter Hollingworth, banned him from preaching in churches under his control.
Spong may be liberal, but vapid he is certainly not, describing the ban in characteristically forthright manner as an example of "ignorant, fundamentalist, evangelical religion". On a previous visit to Melbourne, Spong said that his books sold better per capita in Australia than in any other country, persuading him there was a "spiritual hunger" in Australia that the established churches were failing to satisfy.
Christianity, Spong believes, is at a critical moment in its historical fortunes. "Inside Christianity, it looks like the right-wing is growing but in fact it's a bigger percentage of a smaller number. The old broad church has gone. The thinking people have left. Christianity is a declining reality."
He cites the case of Belgium, a Roman Catholic country, which had 12,000 priests 35 years ago. Now, he says, it has 3000 priests with an average age of more than 60. What happens, he asks, when that progression is stretched over another 10 to 20 years? In recent years, Spong has lectured at universities including Oxford and Harvard. "The old song doesn't sing with that generation any more. They're deeply interested in God, deeply interested in what I call spiritual things, but they're not at all interested in the church and that's where I'm trying to break this thing open." Spong says Christianity is trapped in pre-modern images. "It can't get its message out. The God the church traditionally understands is a supernatural being who lives somewhere above the sky and invades the world periodically through miracles."
Spong says "the entry story" that Christian mythology provided for such a celestial entity was the virgin birth while "the exit story" was the idea of the resurrection as a cosmic ascent. He argues that the idea of the virgin birth did not first appear until more than 50 years after Jesus' death. "I think Jesus was divine because he was fully human. In Jesus, I see the
life of God being lived, the love of God being shared, the being of God manifested. Does that mean I think God impregnated a
Jewish maiden on a Galilean hillside and created a half-God, half-man? To me, that's nonsensical," he says.
Spong believes the early church was trying to say that in the fullness of Jesus' humanity we experience the presence of God and that the idea was then elaborated upon "in a strange way". Spong says the notion of the resurrection as a cosmic ascent would mean that Jesus either went into orbit or further out, into deep space. The gospels do not agree on what actually occurred, he argues. What is known, he says, is that after the death of Jesus when the disciples had forsaken him and fled, "they had some kind of powerful experience that convinced them Jesus was alive in the meaning of God" "This persuaded them to come back and become disciples, to redefine God through Jesus and establish as a new holy day the first day of the week."
Spong sees Christian mythology as an amalgam of the historical influences the religion has encountered over the past 2000 years, initially spreading from being a Jewish sect to absorb Greek and Roman influences. He constantly argues from history, pointing out that arguments arising from literal translations of the Bible have been used in defence of institutions such as slavery, the prosecution of Galileo and the persecution of the Jews. In 1805, an American named Timothy Dwight passionately opposed vaccination on the grounds that it interfered with divine purpose.
"For most people, religion doesn't serve the function of searching for the truth. It's about making people feel secure. If you're a Protestant and you accept that the Bible is the unerring word of God, or if you're a Catholic and you believe the Pope is infallible, you don't have to think. You just accept the authority of the church," he says.
Spong says that, in contemporary affairs, Christianity is defined by what it's opposed to and cites, as an example, the stand by the new Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, "that gay people aren't welcome at the eucharist". Christianity is about empowerment, about living more fully, he says. "Jesus' life transcended the life of the self-centred creature of survival." With him, says Spong, homo sapiens touched the life of the eternal God.
The bishop has what might be described as an evolutionary view of religion. As he tells the story, human existence began as a single cell, probably in Australia. Plants and animals formed, dinosaurs came and went and humans found themselves "top of the heap". Then, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, self-consciousness formed.
In this scheme is there such a thing as sin, I ask. Spong says sin is when we make survival our highest value and become radically self-centred. "If I cross your lifeline or you cross mine, we kill at that point." This principle manifests in arguments over religion, where for one person's conception of God to exist another person's conception has to be destroyed.
Is there such a thing as sexual sin? "Sexual activity either enhances or destroys life. It depends on how you use it. Not all homosexual activity is life enhancing but neither is all heterosexual activity." Recently, in Kalgoorlie, Spong saw a sign iadvertising a brothel tour, a concept he found morally depraved. Similarly, he says a homosexual man who has 1000 partners in a year is enhancing neither his own life or that of his partners.
"I can't tell you what God is," Spong says, "but neither can anyone else. I can only tell you how I experience God. "My understanding of life is limited. In a hundred or a thousand years from now, people are going to think my thoughts were very primitive because knowledge keeps expanding."
The paradox, he agrees, is that once spiritual insights are put into words there will always be those who say the words must never be changed. And, he further agrees, that paradox is unlikely to change.