I was raised a southern baptist. It was at about my thirteenth birthday that I started to think of myself as an agnostic. And it was sometime during my time as a college undergraduate that I began to consider myself an atheist. So, for at least seventeen of my (very soon to be) thirty-two years on this planet, I’ve been a doubter of one sort or another. I first discovered the words of Bishop John Shelby Spong at the Internet Infidels web site (infidels.org), an atheist/agnostic/doubter/free thinker/whatever-you-want-to-call-it resource on the web and on the usenet newsgroup alt.atheism.moderated. Spong is one of the few religious people you’ll often see atheists quote as readily, and with as much favor, as they will Bertrand Russell. And, perhaps, for similar reasons: both are (or in Betrand’s case were) uncompromizing, brave people not afraid to eloquently say what they think is true even if it makes them unpopular. In Russell’s case, that meant publishing books such as Why I am Not a Christian. In Spong’s case, that means publishing books such as Why Christianity Must Change or Die (two books I heartily reccomend to believers and non-believers alike).
I’ve always liked what I’ve read by Spong. He’s a very talented writer and an incredibly gifted speaker. His inteligence and wit is striking and inviting. In the church of my childhood, I grew up around people who, I fear, were believers because they didn’t know any better; Spong, I believe, is a believer because he does know better. And his years of study have pointed him to a way of understanding the possibility and nature of god that is uncommon but incredibly valuable, for doubters and believers alike. Spong’s basic point is that institutionalized religions, practices, and the bible itself are all ways of trying to come to grips with what he calls “the god experience.” But because these practices and words are human inventions–human attempts to define something vast and undefinable–they are limited, far too limited to do the work they set out to do. He takes the god experience as a real thing, but the efforts to literalize it as, by their very human nature, limited, imperfect, often wrong.
This freedom to abandon parts of the biblical story that he finds out of sync with modernity and postmodernity is what sets Spong apart from most bibilical commentators. His is not an exercise in apologetics. He doesn’t have a grand explanation by which Jesus’ god of love can somehow also be the god who kills any enemy of his chosen people. There is no effort, either, to lie by omition. Spongs books and lectures deal directly with the imoral actions described as the actions of god. For Spong, those descriptions are the ones that made sense to people a long time ago, in a world very unlike our own. But, for Spong, there is a third option beyond theism (which he defines as this outdated view of god) and atheism. And that third option is to reconceptualize god as the breath of life, love, and (to borrow a concept from his mentor Paul Tillich) the “ground of all being.” The details of that reconceptualization are beyond the scope of this post. But the central point is that Spong refuses to be limited by past attempts to define this experience of god in which he strongly believes. And by being willing to see the limits of past attempts to describe this experience, he opens the way to describe it in a new language (while realizing that any description will be a limited one). In a talk he gave tonight at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church here in my hometown, Spong said (I’m quoting from memory) “I can’t tell you who god is or what god is and neither can anyone else. All I can do is share with you my experience of god.” And Spong’s experience of god is one a great deal more believable, comforting, and real than any other I’ve encountered heretofore.
“A major function of fundamentalist religion is to bolster deeply insecure and fearful people. This is done by justifying a way of life with all of its defining prejudices. It thereby provides an appropriate and legitimate outlet for one’s anger. The authority of an inerrant Bible that can be readily quoted to buttress this point of view becomes an essential ingredient to such a life. When that Bible is challenged, or relativized, the resulting anger proves the point categorically.” (Spong, Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism).