A New Christianity

Section Internet Links	Wayne's Notes	Jock's Notes
Jock. Ch 13 - Why Does it Matter? Bishop Spong recounts many instances in the book of how his thinking was effected by those who attended his lectures, wrote him and were in his classes. Here at books end he takes one such key comment and reflects upon it. Why does all this matter? How would it change the world if we stopped using theistic references to God?. In answering, he reflects on the errors of the past where the search for truth seemed first to lead to the identification of heresy - and often holy wars. Can our new God-talk avoid this trap of violent dispute?. He made a search of the historical record to find a good example of another way, and could find none. Then an unusual question by John Dominic Crossan presented a path. The question was "Is Christianity more like sex or politics?" That is to say is the matter private or public? But there is nothing he feels "about Christianity that enables it to be contained inside the response of an individual. Christianity is not a private activity." So we must find our answer within the political realm. "Society can be changed only by corporate action." When in the middle of this thinking the Vatican issued Dominus Iesus asserting the Roman Catholic as the only true view of Christianity, you can almost hear Spong sighing. LIFE. Looking to Jesus, he notes that there was no imposing, but rather a pointing to the realm of God. And yet church history has too often been imposing of its agenda and perspective. Perhaps the answer is in following Jesus example and not that of the church. If we have come to understand the God beyond theism as also the God beyond all human and ecclesiastical statements, we have come to understand God is experienced as life. And life is not just rules and order, it is about participation. What enhances life is a sign of God's realm. With such an understanding in hand the new ecclesia will have agendas, will have action plans, will creatively confront those forces which are anti-life. It will confront the evils of racism and homophobia. It will contront the issues of poverty. LOVE. The realm of God is identified also with love. History has seen the church act out of power to kill, to silence, to marginalize its enemies. That's not love. "The agenda of love is not words but action." "The only agenda love has is to create wholeness." The realm of God is experienced when being is affirmed and enhanced. Jesus did not write tests of orthodoxy to establish who the true believers were, but set only the requirement "that you love one another". So perhaps might we avoid the trap of defining new heresy or the trap of being thought new heretics. "We reimage God to keep the world from enduring the pain of a continuing reliance on a theistic deity. ... We need a reformation in our thinking about God not to give people a comfortable God-figure that they can keep in the God-room of their home - a room that they enter periodically to do "God-things". No, we need a reformation so that the ecclesia of the future will invite people into the realm of God, where they can act corporately to enhance life, to expand love, and to encourage being. ... It matters."
Wayne. Ch 14 - The Courage to Move into the Future * We come to the last chapter of our study. When we began we tried to capture what we understood Spong to be saying in this book with the words: "Beyond theism, but not beyond God". I would like to revise that slightly at the ending with these words: Leaving home, but not leaving God. Spong centres his final thoughts on words from a sermon preached by a young student of his at Harvard Divinity School. Katrin Ford suggests in her message that the onslaught of modern secularization is like a flood threatening our town and our home. Gradually, in spite of our denials that a flood has, in fact, descended upon us, our houses are becoming unlivable. In other words, the way we understand God, and faith, and the church, are no longer working for us, and will not protect us from the devastation that is descending on us. Our religion, and the creeds that have attempted to explain that religion for us have provided a profoundly dangerous doctrine of God. Yet, if we begin to wonder about what Spong has been saying, to question, we begin to get cold feet. Perhaps and are tempted to rationalize that we cannot leave our homes. The price is too high. We will just try to survive. Spong is not satisfied with a survival strategy. He believes that we are being given the insights we need to move courageously into the future. Young people can help us here. He is taken by her words in a sermon and decides to use them as key material in his closing chapter. Katie tells us that her discovery of God is that God is no longer the person of tradition or the creeds. Instead, "God is Being itself". "God is life, not the father of life" (236) Spong seems to be identifying Being with living. What does this mean? I have loved my life as one of the churchs ordain servants, he says. I have never wished the church harm. But I no longer believe that this institution - or the Christian faith as this church has traditionally proclaimed it - can continue to live without dramatic change in our post-theistic society (237). We human beings cannot claim to know God, he continues. We can only experience God (237). We claim that the myth we have created is God. But God is greater than our myth. I must now leave the political and ethical compromises that have corrupted the faith of Jesus, Spong says. I believe that I must leave the stifling theology, the patriarchal structure, the enduring prejudices based on race, colour, creed and sexual orientation... But I can never leave the God experience, he concludes. I have walked beyond theism but not beyond God (239). I am convinced that if we stay where the church now is, the faith we possess will surely die. Those who put their trust in popes, denominational structures, exclusivist church doctrines, etc. because of their fears and need for something secure to hold onto, will find themselves profoundly compromised (240-1). The church, the body of Christ, must thus be reconstructed from the bottom up. We must risk radically, and trust that the spirit will guide us into the truth we need to know (241). Christianity, he says, becomes not something to be believed, but a faith into which we must live, a vision that stands before us, inviting us to enter (243). New faith communities will emerge, he says, inside our existing structures (245). We should not fear to leave the old and to claim the new that is before us. At this point, instead of asking more questions, I would like to reproduce a forthcoming column from the In Exile series written by Fr. Ron Rolheiser. Ron is the author of the book on spirituality - The Holy Longing - that we will be studying this winter. I believe that what Rolheiser has to say is not all that different from Spong. And yet I find his assessment easier to understand. Faith and a Time of Agnosticism Why does our generation struggle with faith? Martin Heidegger once gave this answer: "We are too late for the gods and too early for Being." What does he mean by that? First, quite simply that less and less people today have faith in the old way. The gods are receding, as any look around the Western world will tell you. But Heidegger has something else in mind too, namely, the reason the gods are receding is that we don't have the same fears our ancestors once had. Belief in God, he feels, is predicated on a certain fear and astonishment. Former generations, much more than we, felt their vulnerability, mortality, and helplessness in the face of energies and forces beyond them. Because of that, they looked for a power outside of themselves, God, to help them. Fear, among other things, made them believe in God. And they, of necessity, feared many things: plagues that could come at a whim and wipe out whole populations, illnesses for which there was no cure, natural disasters against which there was no defense, hunger as an ever-present threat, and even the normal process of childbirth as potentially ending a woman's life. There were no antibiotics or sophisticated medications or procedures to prolong life, no vaccinations, none of the things we have that make us less vulnerable to whim, nature, disease. Beyond this, they also lived with the fears that came from superstition, from lack of knowledge and of science. There were dark powers, they believed, that could curse you, bring bad luck, kill you. Many things were to be feared. This kind of vulnerability helps induce faith. More positively, though, this vulnerability brought with it the capacity to be astonished. Before a universe that holds so many mysteries - thunder, lightning, the stars, the changing seasons, the process of conception, and the simple inexplicable fact that the sun rises and sets every day - there is cause for healthy astonishment, for holy fear, and there is the constant reminder of our littleness and the fact that life cannot be taken for granted. Today, of course, we have few of these fears. We have faith in medicine, rationality, science, and in what we, humanity, can do for ourselves. As for astonishment before the power of nature? The weather channel has demythologized that. Much of this, in fact, is good in terms of God and faith. Fear is not a good motive for religion, but rather the antithesis of true religion (whose task it is to cast out fear). Mature faith must take its roots in love and gratitude, not fear. Thus, freedom from false fear holds a rich potential for a maturer faith and religion. Nonetheless, for now at least, we don't seem to be actualizing that potential. There is less and less conscious faith. Ordinary consciousness, at least in the Western world, is agnostic and even atheistic. We don't seem to feel a need for God and, consequently, the transcendent is slowly receding. We're too late for the gods. Moreover, as Heidegger adds, we're also "too early for Being." What does this add? For Heidegger, we've lost many of our old fears and superstitions, but aren't necessarily more mature and understanding because of it. We've moved beyond the old sense of helplessness, vulnerability, and mortality, without recognizing the new helplessness, vulnerability, and mortal danger within which we live. Like a child, sauntering along a dangerous ledge but blissfully unaware that he or she is one slip away from serious injury or death, so too are we in our new-found sense of confidence and fearlessness: We think ourselves invulnerable, but are only one doctor's visit, chest pains, or a terrorist attack away from a fearful reminder of our own vulnerability. We aren't immortal after all. But this is not our real helplessness. Fearing for our physical health and safety is not the kind of vulnerability that today opens up a place for God in our lives. The scary ledge we walk along and are in constant danger of falling off has to do with the heart and its illnesses and deaths. More than our bodies, our souls are menaced today: We're all one slip away from a broken heart, a broken family, a broken marriage, a broken life, the loss of a loved one, a betrayal in love, the bitterness of an old friend, the jealousy of a colleague, a coldness of heart within, an anger which won't let go, a wound too deep for forgiveness, and a family, community, church, and world that cannot reconcile. Self-sufficiency is always an illusion, most especially today. We need God as much as did our ancestors. We just don't know it as clearly. Nothing has changed. We still stand in radical insecurity before energies and powers beyond us, storms of the heart, no less frightening than the storms of nature. We're no less helpless, vulnerable, mortal, or fearful than the people of old and need God as much as they did, only for different reasons. Ron Rolheiser Toronto, On. website: www.ronrolheiser.com Questions: 1. When Spong speaks of post-theism and Rolheiser talks of agnosticism, do you sense that they are speaking of the same things? 2. Compare the teaching and writing approach by Spong and Rolheiser. 3. What are some of the questions you would like to ask Spong next week?

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