A New Christianity for a New World - Bishop John Shelby Spong on the News and Christian Faith for Thursday, 29 May 2014 "Questions & Answers"
Question & Answer
Gregory A. Baker, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I am finishing your book, Jesus for the Non-Religious and have found in you, Bart Ehrman and Tom Harpur…finally…people on the planet who explain Christianity humanly – totally unlike any other experience I’ve had in any “traditional” church. You refer to the Christian alumni…are you aware the single largest Christian denomination in the U.S. today is former Roman Catholics? The Church actually sponsors special programs to recruit them back even though the Holy See asserts it owns their souls and it’s a childish fantasy to think they can leave anyway.
I grew up in northern Ohio where we know there were Paleo-Indians living some 12,000 years ago on the very land of my family’s farm. The last of the great Pleistocene glaciers was retreating into Canada. These people I believe were every bit as human as you or I. Yet they were denied the story of Christ, as were millions of other ancient peoples on six continents because they lived before ANY of the Jewish and Christian faiths emerged.
I once asked a Baptist preacher (and I’m not making this up) what has happened to Ohio’s Paleo-Indians after death, since they couldn’t have known Christ and received grace and salvation. He grimaced and stated so regretfully that they are burning in hell for eternity; it’s what Christian faith teaches and demands, but he regrets their fate personally. Quite magnanimous, don’t you think?
Have you ever addressed in your writings the temporal question…why did any of the Torah and subsequent Christianity story appear when and where it did…and how to treat and interpret Christ for pre-history humans who had no exposure to a faith tradition that you emphatically embrace?
Answer:
Dear Gregory,
Thank you for your letter. I hope you realize that I embrace much of what you call “traditional.” I take it quite seriously. I lived my life as a priest in the Anglican Communion (known in America as the Episcopal Church) for 21 years and then as an elected bishop in that church for 24 years. I am still an active participant in the life of my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey. I say the creed every Sunday; I attend the Eucharist. What I don’t do is to take the language of my faith tradition literally. Religious language, religious creeds, religious liturgy, all of them point to truth, none of them captures it. God is not a being, which I or anyone else, can define. God is a presence in which I believe I can live. It is the presence of infinite love, of transcendence and of the deepest mystery. Of course, Jesus is human. The Christian Church has never denied that, but in and through that human medium the Christian Church has claimed that God is experienced as present calling us beyond our limits into what Paul Tillich called a “New Being.” Religion, at its worst, has historically been a barrier-creating activity. It divides the saved from the unsaved, the baptized from the unbaptized, the circumcised from the uncircumcised and the true believer from the heretic. Religious people also seem to consider themselves competent to take on the role of judgment that belongs only to God. That is why I try to introduce people to a Jesus “for the non-religious.” The divine task of judgment does not belong to human beings or to a human institution like the church. When Pope Francis was asked about homosexual priests in the church, he said: “Who am I to judge?” That is exactly correct, but religious leaders, including previous popes, have never been quite able to learn that lesson.
The fate of Pleistocene people who roamed the continents of the western hemisphere is God’s business alone; it is not the church’s business. Our task is not to build either religious institutions or even great empires. The only Christian vocation is to enhance life, to share love and to enable all people to be all that they can be. When one is devoted to life one quickly discovers that judgment never enhances life.
I view history, not just as the passing of time, but also as the unfolding of consciousness. Consciousness rises in different places at different times and in different circumstances. Human beings are today largely embarrassed at the way we once treated people of color, women, homosexual people, Jews and members of religions different from our own. Consciousness does not move backwards. No society re-enslaves those who have been set free, nor does it re-segregate those who have now broken that barrier. No society takes away the woman’s right to vote, to be educated, to enter the professions, or to control her own reproductive processes once those rights have been extended. No society ever forces back into their closets of anonymity those who have come out of those closets. We will not do that now despite the sound and fury of the new American “Tea Party” members. Those who cannot adjust to new changes in consciousness will simply die eventually as maladjusted people, but the world does not change to accommodate them.
I see human religious systems, including Christianity, as only a stage in human development. My vocation as a Christian is to go so deeply into Christianity itself that I will escape all of its human limits, including the limits of its creeds and of its theology. I do not get to that goal by opting out of my faith tradition, but by engaging it and transcending it. I cannot go backwards; I can only go forward. The frontiers of life, including the religious frontiers, are always scary, always anxiety producing, but entering them and crossing them will always be the only way forward. Those whose mission in life is to protect the past will always lose. Welcome to the journey.(John Shelby Spong)
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