Question & Answer
Sharan Melters from Haarlem in the Netherlands, writes:
Question:
My name is Sharan Melters. I am a Dutchman, 67 years old, married and living in Haarlem, a small city near Amsterdam. I studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. After finishing my studies, I worked for 40 years as a teacher at the University of Rotterdam (Hogeschool of Rotterdam). Among other things, I taught the students about violence, love relationships and child abuse, which are my areas of expertise.
Let me explain why I am writing this letter to you. After a so-called “near death experience,” I embraced a spiritual religious perspective and started to read as many of the books about the subject as I possibly could, including yours.
I think it is a pity that relatively few of my fellow Dutchmen are acquainted with your work. I am motivated to change this situation by translating your books into our language. In the meantime, I finished the translation of Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and A New Christianity for a New World. Before I started to study your writings, I translated Melissa Rafael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz and John Hospes, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.
I hope that you will appreciate and encourage my effort to enlighten the Dutch public with your post-rational inspiring reading of the Jesus story. In the meantime, it would be dishonest to keep silence about the fact that I struggled a lot with your point of view concerning evil (A New Christianity for a New World, pages 166-170). Please let me explain. You wrote, “So evil needs to be embraced and transformed as part of our quest for wholeness.” It startled me to read this and I did not understand your motivation. Embracing child abuse to become whole? Embracing the Holocaust to become whole? It is difficult to digest your opinion about this matter. But maybe I misunderstood. You would do me a favor writing a response to this letter of mine.
Answer:
Dear Sharan,
Thank you for your letter. Dutch is one of the European languages into which my books have not been translated so I welcome your initiative. My American publisher, HarperCollins, would be happy to work with you to get them published in the Netherlands and I would be honored. A Dutch publisher must be in touch with HarperCollins for permission to bring the book out in Dutch. They all know how to do that. The contract must be publisher to publisher and not individual to publisher. I will send my publisher a copy of your letter so that they can be in touch with you.
Let me now turn to your question. There is a difference between the concept of evil to which all of humanity is predisposed and the manifestations of evil which most of humanity deplores. In the statement you are questioning from my book, A New Christianity for a New World, I was trying to make sense out of a concept developed by Carl Jung. Human beings, he wrote, had to embrace the shadow side of human life out of which evil flows before we can be made whole. He did not mean that we had to condone or tolerate the manifestations of evil that express themselves in such things as child abuse or the Holocaust.
I do not accept the traditional Christian explanation of original sin which Christian theology suggests distorts our lives and pre-disposes us to evil. That concept assumes a perfect creation from which human life has fallen. As a post-Darwinian such an idea is inconceivable. Human life has emerged from a single cell into self-conscious complexity. There was no perfection from which we could fall.
As living creatures, however, we share in the drive to survive that marks every living thing. There is not a plant, animal or human that is not biologically driven to maximize survival. This drive to survive is real for all living things, but it does not become conscious until human life appears. When in human beings our drive to survive is combined with our self-conscious status the result is that human life is inevitably self-centered. Out of our drive for survival all of our prejudices arise, all of our needs to build ourselves up by tearing others down, all of our attempts to use others for our own self-gratification. Salvation does not mean overcoming the effects of the fall into original sin, it means embracing our reality including our shadow sides and responding to that which calls us beyond our survival needs into a new kind of humanity. Part of what I try to do in the book you have quoted is to recast the entire Christian faith in terms of this understanding of human life.
I will be addressing these things in a deeper and more profound way next fall, probably beginning in October, when I begin a series of columns on what I have called “My Twelve Theses,” which in Luther-like fashion form a call for a New Reformation. So, stay tuned!
John Shelby Spong
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