Rowland Croucher
2004-11-23 03:40:42 UTC
Bishop Spong has nailed his '12 theses' to the Internet, and urged the
Church to debate them.
Rowan Williams considers them, and finds them neither defensible nor
interesting.
Tasmanian Anglican
October 2003
Bishop Spong's argument
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 recognised 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.
So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to
debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.
Rowan Williams replies...
Is it time for a new Reformation? The call has gone out quite a few times in
the past three or four decades, and the imminence of the Millennium adds a
certain piquancy to it.
The Right Reverend John Spong, Bishop of Newark in the US, is right to say -
as he has done in his diocesan journal - that his own version of this demand
is of a rather different order from the earlier Reformation; and this surely
makes it imperative that his bold and gracious invitation to debate these
theses should be taken up with some urgency and seriousness, not least on
the eve of a Lambeth Conference that will undoubtedly be looking hard at
issues of Christian identity and the limits of diversity.
So I had better say at once that, while I believe Bishop Spong has, in these
and other matters, done an indispensable task in focusing our attention on
questions under-examined and poorly thought through, I believe that these
theses represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find
astonishing.
He has rightly urged the Church to think more clearly in many respects about
issues of sex and gender; but I am bothered by the assumption here that the
Church has failed to think through a number of central matters on which
quantities of fairly sophisticated literature have been written over the
entire history of Christian theology.
The implication of the theses is that the sort of questions that might be
asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former would have been unintelligible
or devastating for Augustine, Rahner or Teresa of Avila. The fact is that
significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults
find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so
dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.
Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they
still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different
and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited. I'm thinking of a
good number of Eastern Europeans I know who have found their way to (at
least) a fascinated absorption in classical Christianity through involvement
in dissident politics and underground literature. Or of some American
writers who will, I'm sure, be known to Bishop Spong, from Denise Levertov
to Kathleen Norris, who have produced reflective and imaginative work out of
the same adult recovery of the tradition. Is this tradition as barren as
Spong seems to think?
To answer that requires us to look a bit harder at the theses themselves. In
a way, the first of them indicates where the trouble is going to come: for
there are at least three quite distinct senses of theism current in theology
and religious studies, and it is none too clear which is at issue here.
At the simplest level, theism is, presumably, what atheists deny. Spong
doesn't appear to think of himself as an atheist, so this can't be it.
In a more specialist context, scholars of the phenomenology of mysticism
have sometimes distinguished 'theistic' from 'monistic' experience -
theistic experience being defined as focused upon a reality ultimately
distinct from the self (and the universe), as opposed to a mysticism of
final unification. I'm not convinced that this distinction is actually a
very helpful strategy, but that is another matter; it may be that something
more like this is what Spong has in mind.
But there is also the sense, recently discussed by writers like Nicholas
Lash, of theism as the designation of that abstract belief in God
independent of the specific claims of revelation that flourished in the age
after Descartes - a sense quite close to but not identical with that of
'deism'. It is in this sense that large numbers of theologians would say
that classical Trinitarian orthodoxy is not a form of theism.
I suspect that Spong is feeling his way between the second and the third
senses. His objections seem to be to God as a being independent of the
universe who acts within the universe in a way closely analogous to the way
in which ordinary agents act. The trouble is that, while this might describe
the belief of some rationalist divines in the modern period, and while it
might sound very like the language of a good many ordinary religious
practitioners, it bears no relation at all to what any serious theologian,
from Origen to Barth and beyond, actually says about God - or, arguably, to
what the practice of believers actually implies, whatever the pictorial
idioms employed.
Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the universe.
To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one agent and another
in the world. God is not an object or agent over against the world; God is
the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an activity that activates all
that is around God is more intimate to the world than we can imagine, as the
source of activity or energy itself; and God is more different than we can
imagine, beyond category and kind and definition.
Thus God is never competing for space with agencies in the universe. When
God acts, this does not mean that a hole is torn in the universe by an
intervention from outside, but more that the immeasurably diverse relations
between God's act and created acts and processes may be more or less
transparent to the presence of the unconstrained love that sustains them
all.
The doctrine of the incarnation does not claim that the 'theistic' God (i.e.
a divine individual living outside the universe) turns himself into a member
of the human race, but that this human identity, Jesus of Nazareth, is at
every moment, from conception onwards, related in such a way to God the Word
(God's eternal self-bestowing and self-reflecting) that his life is
unreservedly and uniquely a medium for the unconstrained love that made all
things to be at work in the world to remake all things. Jesus embodies God
the Word or God the Son as totally as (more totally than) the musician in
performance embodies the work performed.
I don't find this bankrupt; I don't find that it fails to make sense to
those trying to learn the language of faith.
And the same point about God not competing for space is pertinent to several
of the other theses. Exactly how the presence of God's action interweaves
with various sets of created and contingent causes is not available for
inspection. We have no breakdown of the relations between God and this or
that situation in the world.
Theologians have argued that the holiness of a human individual or the
prayer of a believer may be factors in a situation that tilt the outcome in
a particular way. This is an intellectually frustrating conclusion in all
sorts of ways, but seems to be the only one that really manages to do
justice to the somewhat chaotic Christian experience of intercession and
unexpected outcomes (miracles, if you must). If the world really does rest
upon divine act, then whatever you say about the regularities of casual
chains is relativised a bit by not quite knowing what counts as a 'cause'
from God's point of view, so to speak.
Bishop Spong describes the resurrection as an act of God. I am not clear how
an immanent deity such as I think he believes in is supposed to act; but if
such a God does act, I don't see why it should be easier for God to act in
people's mind than their bodies. 'Jesus was raised into the meaning of God';
yes, but meanings are constructed by material, historical beings, with
cerebral cortices and larynxes. How does God (or 'God') make a difference to
what people mean?
Spong clearly has no time for the empty-tomb tradition; so it is no surprise
that he also dismisses the virginal conception (though why on earth this
makes Jesus's divinity 'impossible' I fail to understand). I am aware that
there are critical historical grounds for questioning both narrative
clusters and I don't want to dismiss them. But I am very wary of setting
aside the stories on the ground of a broad-brush denial of the miraculous.
For the record: I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of
the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and
I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without
belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked 'Jesus of Nazareth'
turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.
The virginal conception looks less straightforward, if you are neither a
fundamentalist nor someone committed to the principled denial of miracles.
Is it possible to believe in the incarnation without this? Yes, I think so
(I did for a few years). But I also have an uncomfortable feeling that the
more you reflect on the incarnation, the less of a problem you may have.
There is a rather haunting passage in John Neville Figgis about - as it were
- waking up one day and finding you believe it after all. My sentiments
exactly.
Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don't believe in a
God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it's harder
to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter
unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant
virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people
thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.
Perhaps, too, it has a bit to do with the sense of utterly unexpected
absolution or release, the freeing of the heart.
The cross as sacrifice? God knows, there are barbaric ways of putting this;
but as a complex and apparently inescapable metaphor (which, in the Bible,
is about far more than propitiation) it has always said something sobering
about the fact that human liberation doesn't come cheap, that the degree of
human self-delusion is so colossal as to involve 'some total gain or loss'
(in the words of Auden's poem about Bonhoeffer) in the task of overcoming
it. And that human beings compulsively deceive themselves about who and what
they are is a belief to which Darwinism is completely immaterial.
Of course, if you want to misunderstand Darwin as establishing a narrative
of steady spiritual or intellectual evolution, you will indeed want to say
that all existing ethical standards are relative. How, then, are you going
to deal with claims by this or that group that they are moving on to the
next evolutionary stage? In what sense can ethics fail to be about the
contests of power, if there is nothing to which we are all answerable at all
times?
Of course the parameters of ethical understanding shift: but the shifts in
Christian ethics on, for example, slavery, usury and contraception, have had
to argue long and hard to establish that they are in some way drawing out an
entailment of what is there, or honouring some fundamental principle in what
is there. In other words, these changes in convention have had to show a
responsibility to certain principles that continue to identify this kind of
talk as still recognisably Christian talk.
It makes for hard work - as is obvious with current debates about
homosexuality or nuclear war; but it is hard work because of the need to
continue listening to what is said and written.
But then we discover in Spong's theses that there is, after all, a
non-negotiable principle, based upon the image of God in human beings.
Admirable; but what does it mean in Spong's theological world? What is the
image of a 'non-theistic' God? And where, for goodness' sake, does he derive
this belief about humans? It is neither scientific nor obvious.
It is, in fact, what we used to call a dogma of revealed religion. It is a
painful example of the sheerly sentimental use of phraseology whose
rationale depends upon a theology that is being overtly rejected. What can
it be more than a rather unfairly freighted and emotive substitute for some
kind of bland egalitarianism - bland because ungrounded and therefore
desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more
robust ideology? It is impossible to think too often of the collapse of
liberalism in 1930s Germany.
It is no great pleasure to write so negatively about a colleague from whom
I, like many others, have learned. But I cannot in any way see Bishop
Spong's theses as representing a defensible or even an interesting Christian
future. And I want to know whether the Christian past scripture and
tradition, really appears to him as empty and sterile as this text suggests.
It seems he has not found life here, and that is painful to acknowledge and
to hear. Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us
into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no
incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no
Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.
Does he know that generations of believers have argued the need to separate
hope for life after death from earthly rewards and punishments? They believe
that the present and future delight of enjoying God's intimacy made all such
talk irrelevant.
Does he see at all that the recognition of God's image in everyone, in such
a way as to drive people to risk everything for it (Wilberforce? Dorothy
Day? Desmond Tutu? Bonhoeffer? Romero?), seems persistently to come from an
immersion in the dark reality of God's difference and in the uncompromising
paradoxes of incarnation of the Almighty?
Culturally speaking, the Christian religion is one of those subjects about
which it is cool to be ignorant. Spong's account of classical Christian
faith simply colludes with such ignorance in a way that cannot surely
reflect his own knowledge of it. I think I understand the passion behind all
this, the passion to make sense to those for whom the faith is at best
quaint and at worst oppressive, nonsense.
But the sense is made (in so far as it is made at all) by a denial of the
resources already there - to the extent that Spong's own continuing
commitment to the tradition becomes incomprehensible.
Living in the Christian institution isn't particularly easy. It is,
generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold
office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it's doing to your
soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?
Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome
truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don't think I
could put up with it for five minutes if I didn't believe this; and - if I
can't try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit - I don't
know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.
At the time of writing Rowan Williams was Bishop of Monmouth. Rowan Williams
is now Archbishop of Canterbury.
Transcribed and reproduced with permission from the 17 July 1998 edition of
Church Times
Shalom!
Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
13700+ articles including 3000 clean jokes/stories
Church to debate them.
Rowan Williams considers them, and finds them neither defensible nor
interesting.
Tasmanian Anglican
October 2003
Bishop Spong's argument
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 recognised 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.
So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to
debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.
Rowan Williams replies...
Is it time for a new Reformation? The call has gone out quite a few times in
the past three or four decades, and the imminence of the Millennium adds a
certain piquancy to it.
The Right Reverend John Spong, Bishop of Newark in the US, is right to say -
as he has done in his diocesan journal - that his own version of this demand
is of a rather different order from the earlier Reformation; and this surely
makes it imperative that his bold and gracious invitation to debate these
theses should be taken up with some urgency and seriousness, not least on
the eve of a Lambeth Conference that will undoubtedly be looking hard at
issues of Christian identity and the limits of diversity.
So I had better say at once that, while I believe Bishop Spong has, in these
and other matters, done an indispensable task in focusing our attention on
questions under-examined and poorly thought through, I believe that these
theses represent a level of confusion and misinterpretation that I find
astonishing.
He has rightly urged the Church to think more clearly in many respects about
issues of sex and gender; but I am bothered by the assumption here that the
Church has failed to think through a number of central matters on which
quantities of fairly sophisticated literature have been written over the
entire history of Christian theology.
The implication of the theses is that the sort of questions that might be
asked by a bright 20th century sixth-former would have been unintelligible
or devastating for Augustine, Rahner or Teresa of Avila. The fact is that
significant numbers of those who turn to Christian faith as educated adults
find the doctrinal and spiritual tradition which Bishop Spong treats so
dismissively a remarkably large room to live in.
Doctrinal statements may stretch and puzzle, and even repel, and yet they
still go on claiming attention and suggesting a strange, radically different
and imaginatively demanding world that might be inhabited. I'm thinking of a
good number of Eastern Europeans I know who have found their way to (at
least) a fascinated absorption in classical Christianity through involvement
in dissident politics and underground literature. Or of some American
writers who will, I'm sure, be known to Bishop Spong, from Denise Levertov
to Kathleen Norris, who have produced reflective and imaginative work out of
the same adult recovery of the tradition. Is this tradition as barren as
Spong seems to think?
To answer that requires us to look a bit harder at the theses themselves. In
a way, the first of them indicates where the trouble is going to come: for
there are at least three quite distinct senses of theism current in theology
and religious studies, and it is none too clear which is at issue here.
At the simplest level, theism is, presumably, what atheists deny. Spong
doesn't appear to think of himself as an atheist, so this can't be it.
In a more specialist context, scholars of the phenomenology of mysticism
have sometimes distinguished 'theistic' from 'monistic' experience -
theistic experience being defined as focused upon a reality ultimately
distinct from the self (and the universe), as opposed to a mysticism of
final unification. I'm not convinced that this distinction is actually a
very helpful strategy, but that is another matter; it may be that something
more like this is what Spong has in mind.
But there is also the sense, recently discussed by writers like Nicholas
Lash, of theism as the designation of that abstract belief in God
independent of the specific claims of revelation that flourished in the age
after Descartes - a sense quite close to but not identical with that of
'deism'. It is in this sense that large numbers of theologians would say
that classical Trinitarian orthodoxy is not a form of theism.
I suspect that Spong is feeling his way between the second and the third
senses. His objections seem to be to God as a being independent of the
universe who acts within the universe in a way closely analogous to the way
in which ordinary agents act. The trouble is that, while this might describe
the belief of some rationalist divines in the modern period, and while it
might sound very like the language of a good many ordinary religious
practitioners, it bears no relation at all to what any serious theologian,
from Origen to Barth and beyond, actually says about God - or, arguably, to
what the practice of believers actually implies, whatever the pictorial
idioms employed.
Classical theology maintains that God is indeed different from the universe.
To say this is to suggest a radical difference between one agent and another
in the world. God is not an object or agent over against the world; God is
the eternal activity of unconstrained love, an activity that activates all
that is around God is more intimate to the world than we can imagine, as the
source of activity or energy itself; and God is more different than we can
imagine, beyond category and kind and definition.
Thus God is never competing for space with agencies in the universe. When
God acts, this does not mean that a hole is torn in the universe by an
intervention from outside, but more that the immeasurably diverse relations
between God's act and created acts and processes may be more or less
transparent to the presence of the unconstrained love that sustains them
all.
The doctrine of the incarnation does not claim that the 'theistic' God (i.e.
a divine individual living outside the universe) turns himself into a member
of the human race, but that this human identity, Jesus of Nazareth, is at
every moment, from conception onwards, related in such a way to God the Word
(God's eternal self-bestowing and self-reflecting) that his life is
unreservedly and uniquely a medium for the unconstrained love that made all
things to be at work in the world to remake all things. Jesus embodies God
the Word or God the Son as totally as (more totally than) the musician in
performance embodies the work performed.
I don't find this bankrupt; I don't find that it fails to make sense to
those trying to learn the language of faith.
And the same point about God not competing for space is pertinent to several
of the other theses. Exactly how the presence of God's action interweaves
with various sets of created and contingent causes is not available for
inspection. We have no breakdown of the relations between God and this or
that situation in the world.
Theologians have argued that the holiness of a human individual or the
prayer of a believer may be factors in a situation that tilt the outcome in
a particular way. This is an intellectually frustrating conclusion in all
sorts of ways, but seems to be the only one that really manages to do
justice to the somewhat chaotic Christian experience of intercession and
unexpected outcomes (miracles, if you must). If the world really does rest
upon divine act, then whatever you say about the regularities of casual
chains is relativised a bit by not quite knowing what counts as a 'cause'
from God's point of view, so to speak.
Bishop Spong describes the resurrection as an act of God. I am not clear how
an immanent deity such as I think he believes in is supposed to act; but if
such a God does act, I don't see why it should be easier for God to act in
people's mind than their bodies. 'Jesus was raised into the meaning of God';
yes, but meanings are constructed by material, historical beings, with
cerebral cortices and larynxes. How does God (or 'God') make a difference to
what people mean?
Spong clearly has no time for the empty-tomb tradition; so it is no surprise
that he also dismisses the virginal conception (though why on earth this
makes Jesus's divinity 'impossible' I fail to understand). I am aware that
there are critical historical grounds for questioning both narrative
clusters and I don't want to dismiss them. But I am very wary of setting
aside the stories on the ground of a broad-brush denial of the miraculous.
For the record: I have never quite managed to see how we can make sense of
the sacramental life of the Church without a theology of the risen body; and
I have never managed to see how to put together such a theology without
belief in the empty tomb. If a corpse clearly marked 'Jesus of Nazareth'
turned up, I should save myself a lot of trouble and become a Quaker.
The virginal conception looks less straightforward, if you are neither a
fundamentalist nor someone committed to the principled denial of miracles.
Is it possible to believe in the incarnation without this? Yes, I think so
(I did for a few years). But I also have an uncomfortable feeling that the
more you reflect on the incarnation, the less of a problem you may have.
There is a rather haunting passage in John Neville Figgis about - as it were
- waking up one day and finding you believe it after all. My sentiments
exactly.
Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don't believe in a
God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it's harder
to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter
unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant
virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people
thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.
Perhaps, too, it has a bit to do with the sense of utterly unexpected
absolution or release, the freeing of the heart.
The cross as sacrifice? God knows, there are barbaric ways of putting this;
but as a complex and apparently inescapable metaphor (which, in the Bible,
is about far more than propitiation) it has always said something sobering
about the fact that human liberation doesn't come cheap, that the degree of
human self-delusion is so colossal as to involve 'some total gain or loss'
(in the words of Auden's poem about Bonhoeffer) in the task of overcoming
it. And that human beings compulsively deceive themselves about who and what
they are is a belief to which Darwinism is completely immaterial.
Of course, if you want to misunderstand Darwin as establishing a narrative
of steady spiritual or intellectual evolution, you will indeed want to say
that all existing ethical standards are relative. How, then, are you going
to deal with claims by this or that group that they are moving on to the
next evolutionary stage? In what sense can ethics fail to be about the
contests of power, if there is nothing to which we are all answerable at all
times?
Of course the parameters of ethical understanding shift: but the shifts in
Christian ethics on, for example, slavery, usury and contraception, have had
to argue long and hard to establish that they are in some way drawing out an
entailment of what is there, or honouring some fundamental principle in what
is there. In other words, these changes in convention have had to show a
responsibility to certain principles that continue to identify this kind of
talk as still recognisably Christian talk.
It makes for hard work - as is obvious with current debates about
homosexuality or nuclear war; but it is hard work because of the need to
continue listening to what is said and written.
But then we discover in Spong's theses that there is, after all, a
non-negotiable principle, based upon the image of God in human beings.
Admirable; but what does it mean in Spong's theological world? What is the
image of a 'non-theistic' God? And where, for goodness' sake, does he derive
this belief about humans? It is neither scientific nor obvious.
It is, in fact, what we used to call a dogma of revealed religion. It is a
painful example of the sheerly sentimental use of phraseology whose
rationale depends upon a theology that is being overtly rejected. What can
it be more than a rather unfairly freighted and emotive substitute for some
kind of bland egalitarianism - bland because ungrounded and therefore
desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more
robust ideology? It is impossible to think too often of the collapse of
liberalism in 1930s Germany.
It is no great pleasure to write so negatively about a colleague from whom
I, like many others, have learned. But I cannot in any way see Bishop
Spong's theses as representing a defensible or even an interesting Christian
future. And I want to know whether the Christian past scripture and
tradition, really appears to him as empty and sterile as this text suggests.
It seems he has not found life here, and that is painful to acknowledge and
to hear. Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us
into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no
incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no
Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.
Does he know that generations of believers have argued the need to separate
hope for life after death from earthly rewards and punishments? They believe
that the present and future delight of enjoying God's intimacy made all such
talk irrelevant.
Does he see at all that the recognition of God's image in everyone, in such
a way as to drive people to risk everything for it (Wilberforce? Dorothy
Day? Desmond Tutu? Bonhoeffer? Romero?), seems persistently to come from an
immersion in the dark reality of God's difference and in the uncompromising
paradoxes of incarnation of the Almighty?
Culturally speaking, the Christian religion is one of those subjects about
which it is cool to be ignorant. Spong's account of classical Christian
faith simply colludes with such ignorance in a way that cannot surely
reflect his own knowledge of it. I think I understand the passion behind all
this, the passion to make sense to those for whom the faith is at best
quaint and at worst oppressive, nonsense.
But the sense is made (in so far as it is made at all) by a denial of the
resources already there - to the extent that Spong's own continuing
commitment to the tradition becomes incomprehensible.
Living in the Christian institution isn't particularly easy. It is,
generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold
office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it's doing to your
soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?
Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome
truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don't think I
could put up with it for five minutes if I didn't believe this; and - if I
can't try to say this in a pastoral, not an inquisitorial, spirit - I don't
know quite why Bishop Spong puts up with it.
At the time of writing Rowan Williams was Bishop of Monmouth. Rowan Williams
is now Archbishop of Canterbury.
Transcribed and reproduced with permission from the 17 July 1998 edition of
Church Times
Shalom!
Rowland Croucher
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/
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