Study Guide to John Shelby Spong A New Christianity for a New World.   ADDITIONAL RESOURCES: Preliminary Session

The following materials were prepared by Keith McPaul for his NCNW study group at Maleny, Queensland:

Twelve Theses

I Believe: A Creed by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Religious Literacy

Setting the Stage (Mail to Spong from readers)

 

Keith has also provided materials prepared for sessions 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6.

I BELIEVE: A Creed by Bishop John Shelby Spong

(Paraphrased from Why Christianity Must Change or Die)

 

1. I believe that there is a transcendent reality present in the very heart of life. I name that reality God.
2. I believe that this reality has a bias toward life and wholeness and that its presence is experienced as that which calls us beyond all our fearful and fragile human limits.
3. I believe that this reality can be found in all that is but that it reaches self-consciousness and the capability of being named, communed with, and recognised only in human life.
4. I believe that heaven, the domain in which this reality has traditionally been domiciled, is not a place but a symbol standing for the limitlessness of Being itself.
5. I believe that this realm of heaven is entered whenever the barriers that seem to bind human life into something less than that for which it is capable are set aside.
6. I believe in Jesus, called Messiah, or Christ.
7. I believe that in his life this transcendent reality has been revealed so completely that it caused people to refer to him as God's son, even God's only son. The burning God intensity was so real in him that I look at his life and say, "in you I see the meaning of God, so for me you are both Lord and Christ."
8. I believe that Jesus was a God presence, a powerful experience of the reality of that Ground of Being undergirding us all at the very depths of life. That is why the earliest Christians interpreted this Christ experience in the language of theism. That was the only language in which they new how to speak of God.
9. I believe, therefore, that being in touch with the Ground of Being creates the universal communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the doorway into the life that is everlasting.

 

Note:   "I am first, last, and always a believer. I define myself theologically as a believer, who lives in a state of exile. I have lived and worshipped as a believer. I shall continue to do so and to be so until the day I die. When that moment comes, I expect to enter even more deeply into the reality of the God in whom I have lived and moved and had my being. I am therefore at peace. Shalom."

 

Religious Literacy

Greg Jenks regards a study such as we are about to undertake, a course in RELIGIOUS LITERACY. What is religious literacy, and why is it important for the health of religious communities?

Religious literacy is not about being correct. It does not ensure that we will always draw the right conclusions. But it is about being well informed: including a capacity to locate relevant information and employ it appropriately. But it goes beyond having 'information' available, to include 'competence' in forming our religious values and acting upon them.

Generally Christians are unaware of the great body of scholarship that is relevant to our faith. It is not usually possible, or appropriate, to cover many of the new issues from the pulpit. We are, unfortunately, left to found out about many of the religious ideas of the day in the popular press, which to a large degree still portrays religion and Christianity in particular, in outmoded stereotypes. It is important that Christians have a basic capacity to weigh up the claims of those who invoke religion in support of their social and political agendas.

A friend of mine, Prof. John Cobb Jr., says that a book or a lecture can stimulate you with new ideas that will enable you to agree or disagree with a position, but unless you allow your own thoughts to take wings, it will not be your thinking. "Real Christian theology is not just for professional. It is for Christians who think." "In fact, if there is a renewal of thinking in the church, there will be church renewal. Without it there won't. Trying to renew the church with gimmicks, or merely by arousing emotion, will not do the job. The church is strong only when it lives by the mature convictions of its members. Mature convictions are shaped in thought."

In his new book A New Christianity for a New World, Bishop John Shelby Spong invites us to expand our 'religious literacy' as we try to answer two questions; "What does God look like beyond a dying theism?", and "Does such a God matter?" In the next few weeks we will be each challenged to answer for ourselves, these and other questions about our personal beliefs.

Bp Spong questions the right of the 'institutionalised Church to present itself as the exclusive pathway to God. "Christianity will always be the pathway to God on which I journey, but I am now convinced that no human system, including Christianity itself, can maintain the exclusive power-claims of its past."

"In this volume [A New Christianity for a New World] I will seek to articulate a vision of Christianity so radically reformulated that it can live in this brave new world. Yet my hope is also to demonstrate that this Christianity of the future is still in touch with the experience that propelled this faith-tradition into being more than two thousand years ago." " I want it to be not an attack on the inadequacy of what is, but a vision of the power of what might be. I write only to issue an invitation to come and listen, to explore these possibilities, and to see if by travelling on a new road we can enter the reality of the God beyond theism and hear the voice of Christ speaking in the vocabulary of a post-Christian world."

 

Setting the Stage: The Parameters of the Debate

from: John Shelby Spong, Here I Stand, 2000

 

"Your words are not just heresy, they are apostasy. Burning you at the stake would be too kind!"  [Pittsburgh, Pa]

"Your book was like manna from heaven -- God-sent! I cannot adequately express my gratitude." [Richmond, Va]

"You rail against the Church's doctrines and core beliefs while you accept wages from her. Even whores appreciate their clients. You, sir, have less integrity than a whore!" [Selma, Al]

"You have made it possible for me to remain in the Church and have taught me how to believe honestly its creeds even in the twentieth century."  [Boston, Ma]

"Bishop Spong, you are full of sh-t. We are going to clean you up." [An orthodox Christian]

"Reading your book is like eating a delicious Black Forest cherry birthday cake. It has made me vulnerable while increasing my desire to worship."   [British Columbia, Canada]

"Remember, as you prance about disguised as a minister of the gospel, that you will pay for your sins eternally in the lake of fire." [Charleston, SC]

"Your book is a transcendent work of brilliance and, I am sure, permanence." [Pasadena, Ca]

"I hope the next plane on which you fly crashes. You are not worthy of life. If all else fails, I will try to rid the world of your evil presence personally." [Orlando, Fl]

"I believe you are a prophet and I will strive with you to answer God's call to live fully, love wastefully, and be all that I can be. Thank you, thank you, and may your life continue to be blessed. [Grosse Point, Mi]

 

These are excerpts from but a tiny few of literally thousands of letters I have received in my career as a bishop. They clearly reveal the diversity of responses my life, ministry, and writings have elicited over the years. If someone had told me years ago that I would create these enormous levels of both appreciation and hostility in my ordained life, I would have been dumbfounded, shocked, and probably deeply hurt. How did it happen? What created these twin emotions of praise and anger, of gratitude and fear?

 

 

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