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Happy Thanksgiving from the team at ProgressiveChristianity.org! A New Chrisitianity for a New World: Bishop John Shelby Spong on the News and Christian Faith "Questions and Answers" for Thursday, 27 November 2014
We hope you enjoy this complimentary essay from Bishop Spong.
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Do Our Seminaries Prepare Clergy for Today’s World?
Writing about the Theological School at Drew University this past week caused me to think about theological education in general and my own theological education in particular. I loved the experience I had at the Protestant Episcopal Seminary in Virginia (VTS), but a year after graduating I realized that the gap between what my seminary had prepared me to do and the issues I actually faced was enormous. They trained me for a world that no longer existed. I had entered seminary in the fall of 1952 when I was only 21 years of age. I was a man in a hurry filled with no ambition except to be the best priest that I could be, demonstrating the evangelical fervor of my Southern upbringing. This seminary challenged that piety, but looking back only one faculty member sought to help us build a new foundation for ministry. His name was Clifford L. Stanley and he had trained under Paul Tillich at Union Seminary in New York City.
Today, I still regard Tillich as the outstanding Christian theologian of the 20th century and Cliff was a thorough-going Tillichian. God for Tillich was not a “being,” supernatural in power, who dwelled somewhere external to the world, usually thought of as above the sky, and ready to invade the world to answer our prayers or to assert the divine will. God for Tillich was “being itself” or the “Ground of Being.” To say it another way, God was that in which everything that is, is rooted and grounded. It was a powerful, but confusing, concept and I wrestled constantly with how I could integrate this concept into that structure of faith in which I had been raised. The rest of the faculty was of no help since most of them were still largely rooted in the neo-orthodox revival of World War I. Karl Barth was their hero, not Paul Tillich.
Tillich and his protégé, Cliff Stanley, had absorbed the lessons of Copernicus and Galileo, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, each of whom had challenged Christian concepts very deeply. Copernicus and Galileo had expanded our understanding of the universe enormously, making so much of the Bible that assumed that the earth was the center of a three-tiered universe irrelevant. Sir Isaac Newton had determined that this world operated according to fixed mathematical laws, which made miracles and magic with which the Bible was filled, no longer viable. Charles Darwin had changed our whole understanding of the origins of life. If Darwin was correct, and that is not debatable, then there was no such thing as a state of “original perfection” from which any of us could fall into what the church loved to call “original sin!” Life had rather evolved over billions of years from a single cell into self-conscious complexity. With no “fall” there was no need for a savior to rescue us from a fall that never happened. So the way we had all learned over the centuries to tell the “Jesus story” fell into being pious non-sense. No one can be saved from a fall that never happened, nor can one be restored to a status one has never possessed. Baptism to cleanse us of our original sin and the Eucharist, which celebrated our rescue through the death of Jesus, became untranslatable concepts.
These startling, but still exciting ideas, desperately needed to be processed and one would think that the place to do that processing would be in the scripture classes this seminary offered. The courses that were offered, however, never engaged Tillich’s challenge. We did some “source critical” work. We learned the familiar biblical stories. We made friends with the prophets, but scripture and theology never mixed. It was as if the two subjects lived in two different worlds. The professor who taught John’s gospel did so from notes yellow with age. I never heard the name of Rudolf Bultmann mentioned. Today, I regard him as the seminal scripture scholar of the 20th century. To teach the New Testament without engaging Bultmann makes about as much sense as teaching psychology in the 20th century without engaging Freud. The issues that would fuel the stirring theological revolution that was destined to break upon the Western world in the 1960’s with the publication of John A. T. Robinson’s book, Honest to God and the “God is Dead” movement were simply not on this seminary’s radar screen in the 1950’s..
My first church assignment was to be rector of a small Episcopal Church adjacent to the campus of Duke University. My congregation was made up largely of young, married PhD and MD candidates and very bright university undergraduates. It was there that I discovered very quickly that my seminary spent its time answering questions that this generation was no longer asking. These young adults’ idea of Christianity had been shaped by the certainties of either Protestant fundamentalism or authoritarian Catholicism. Neither was a resource for them now when they confronted the intellectual power of this great university. Their religious training, like mine at Virginia Seminary, simply could not relate to the intellectual world in which they now lived. They were forced, therefore, either to reject their religious upbringing or to reject their modern education. Most rejected their religious upbringing. The ones who did not simply closed their minds to the explosion of knowledge over the last 500 years and began to join such organizations as the “Campus Crusade for Christ.” On campus church groups tended to be ghettoes of religious safety that appeared to move in an alternate universe.
Virginia Seminary also reflected far more than it realized the isolated world of the white male. I had one black classmate in my first year. I had no female classmates or openly gay classmates. The seminary lived out the cultural values of the region of America in which it was located. The “liberal” bishops of the South sought to deal with de-segregation by adopting a policy called “gradualism,” that is, the pace of integration was to be determined by the ability of the white people to adjust. No one seemed to understand that justice postponed was justice denied or that the “abundant life” Jesus promised for all people could not be compromised by “church sanctioned” human resistance.
Despite those feelings, I was not an alienated graduate. Indeed, I poured lots of energy into VTS. I was nominated to and served on its Board of Trustees. I was elected president of its Alumni Association. I served on the committee to select a new dean. All the time, however, I was moving away from almost everything that my seminary had taught me other than the work of Paul Tillich, yet my seminary seemed to me to be moving back into its religious past. Perhaps they feared they could not engage this world without sacrificing everything they held sacred.
I hoped that my service on the committee to nominate a new dean for the seminary would be the place where I could make a difference to the seminary’s future. That, however, was not to be. The faculty chose three professors to represent them on this committee. They were their most conservative and traditionalist members and they in turn dominated the choice. The new dean chosen, not unanimously because of my vote, was a good man. I certainly did not dislike him, but he was destined to start that seminary on a backward trek. His successor continued that backward path. Perhaps one reason for this negative direction was that this seminary was threatened by the establishment of an evangelical seminary in Pennsylvania. One of the VTS faculty members left to go there to teach “the true faith.” Part of this new seminary’s reason for getting started was that all the others had “abandoned the true faith and the biblical standards of ethics.” This new seminary was cool to women and hostile to homosexual people. My seminary tried to counter their influence by adding to its faculty two English evangelicals and a conservative theology professor named David Scott. All three were deeply homophobic.
The downward spiral continued until my seminary chose the first woman to be its dean. Then it seemed to stop its backward path. It did not yet begin to move forward. When the present dean was chosen in 2007, I was encouraged because he was young, bright and seemed open to the broader world. He had done his doctoral work under one of my best friends in England, Dr. Keith Ward of Oxford University. He has also headed the Hartford Theological Seminary where ecumenical and even interfaith dialogue was common, especially across the Christian-Moslem boundary. He had invited me to teach at Hartford on two different occasions. He just might be the change my seminary needed, I thought. When he arrived, however, he began to reflect his new environment more than he challenged it. He talked about “progressive orthodoxy,” an oxymoron if I ever heard one. He questioned publicly the statistical decline that main-line churches are facing. He did invite me back to speak. It was a rather passive, whenever you are in the area, kind of invitation. When I came, however, the student introducing me said I was there to show how open VTS was. A month earlier, he said, the seminary had hosted the bishop of South Carolina, who had just left the Episcopal Church because of its acceptance of gay people. I have no interest in being used to shore up this seminary’s reputation for openness.
Another symbol of its still negative past remains. One of its alumni, the Rev. Dr. Katherine Ragsdale, was chosen in 2009 to be the dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of America’s pre-eminent theological training centers. She had come through VTS as a candidate for the priesthood from my diocese. Yet, when this brilliant woman was elected to head EDS, she has informed me, no one at Virginia Seminary wrote her a note of congratulations, informed the world of her election in its alumni publication or represented Virginia Seminary at her installation. VTS, which automatically gives honorary doctorates to its alumni who are elected bishop, made no move to recognize this graduate with an honorary degree. She was ignored. Why this apparent rudeness? She is an out-of-the-closet, partnered lesbian. When an institution acts like that, how can it pretend that it is preparing clergy for ministry in tomorrow’s church? I had hoped for more. I still do, but this seminary must embrace the future, not try to back into it.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Susie Yorke, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I have read your book Eternal Life: A New Vision with great interest and have found in it much to which I can relate. Apart from a brief mention of childhood prayers (which frightened you because of their association with death) you do not say whether we should pray to this God of yours whom we should strive to find deep within ourselves. Theologians like John Bowker, however, hold that prayer is essential and holds the key to growing into a knowledge of God – whatever we mean by that term. Your thoughts on this subject please.
Answer:
Dear Susie,
Thank you for your letter and your comments. If you look at the bibliography of that book, you will see that I cite two of John Bowker’s books as references. They are God: A Brief History and The Cambridge History of Religion. He is a particular favorite of mine and I was introduced to his work by Karen Armstrong.
But, Susie, Eternal Life: A New Vision - Beyond Religion - Beyond Theism- Beyond Heaven and Hell was not a book about prayer. It had a very clear single focus. Like Bowker, I too believe that prayer is essential, but before I could have that conversation, I would have to re-define both what I mean by God and what I mean by prayer. God is not a Santa Claus like figure to whom endless requests are to be made along with the promise to be good so as to deserve that for which we ask and prayer is not a matter of petitioning a supernatural being above the sky to do something for me that I cannot do for myself. Prayer is much more about developing a relationship with the realm of the spirit that helps me to redefine who God is, what it means to be human and what it means to be related to that which is both ultimate and holy. Prayer as I both understand it and practice it would be closer to the meaning of words like meditation and contemplation than it seems to mean to most people who use the word prayer today.
The Christian life calls me to walk into a new kind of human maturity and stop pretending that there is a heavenly parent out there somewhere, who is ready to protect me in need and to come to my aid when I am imperiled. To enter this discussion means that I must be open to develop a new definition of what the word “God” means and a new understanding of what prayer is all about. John Bowker’s definition of prayer, to which you refer, seems to me to be in harmony with what I am trying to describe. If I had addressed this subject in my book on eternal life, it would have added some 200 pages to the text.
I have written on prayer a number of times in this column. I have two chapters on prayer in my book, A New Christianity for a New World. My first book, written in 1972 called Honest Prayer, has just been brought back into print by St. Johann Press in Haworth, New Jersey. I have not, however, undertaken to write a whole new volume on this subject and probably will not.
One of my younger colleagues, The Reverend Gretta Vosper, a pastor in the United Church of Canada, has done so and Harper Collins of Toronto has published it under the title Amen. It is the best book I have read on prayer in the forty years of my writing career. I commend that book to you.(John Shelby Spong)
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