Louisville Process Theology Network

John Shelby Spong's Religion I

Nov 11, 2009

Excerpts from an interview of retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of numerous books including "Eternal Life: A New Vision" (2009). See www.abc.net.au/compass/intervs/


Question from the audience: Could you tell me, or explain to me, what happens after this life?

You talk a lot about the God experience in this life and Jesus as a model of some sort for you. Where are we after death, and for those who put their faith in Jesus, if that is a phrase you are happy with?

Bishop Spong:
I get asked frequently about life after death. And for about three years of my life it was the primary study, it was the thing I was most deeply engaged in, and I actually hoped to write a book about it once upon a time. But I gave that up.

I gave that up only because I never could narrow the subject down. The more I got into it the more it just kept expanding. And I, you know, it was thousands of pages I couldn't imagine what a book like that would look like. And the reason it's so long and so difficult is that nobody really knows.

I happen to believe in life after death. I believe in life after death for a very specific reason; I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment, and I do wish we could get that element out.

If my motivation for leading the Christian life is so that I'll get a reward or avoid a punishment, I think I have not escaped the radical self-centeredness of my still evolving and not yet finished humanity.

I believe in life after death because I believe is real, and I believe God is eternal, and because I am in a living relationship with that eternal God. And because God is eternal and because I am in a relationship with that God, then I believe I will share in God's eternity.

And I don't want to paint pictures any more than that because I don't know and neither does anybody else. I simply trust that. I live with God in this life, I will trust God when my life comes to an end, and I think that means that I will live. And God is the reason because God is eternal. I will share in God's eternity.

That's as far as I want to go. The idea that we would use heaven and hell to try to scare people into conforming to our standards here on this earth, I think there's very little difference between the god who's keeping record books so that this god can give our rewards and punishment, and Santa Claus who's making a list and checking it twice and he's going to find out who's naughty and nice. I think we've gotten those two things pretty deeply confused.

Yes, over here please.


Question from the audience: You talk about Christianity as being your passage to truth and to God, and I understand what you mean by that in both a personal and a cultural sense.

But I detect in a lot of what you say and a lot of your writings that you're engaged in a process of detribalizing Christianity in a sociological sense, and also in reducing its message to a set of universal precepts in a theological sense.

Now if the history of religion suggests anything to me, it is that it's quite likely as the world becomes a global village and more conscious of its vulnerabilities, that will be a necessary process in any event, whether we like it or not.

So my question to you is - you make the statement, Christianity must change or die - my question to you is, why not let it die?


Bishop Spong: Well it's a good question, and certainly one that I hear frequently. I don't want to let Christianity die because I think it brings three things to our world that our world will be infinitely poorer if it ceases to have.

The first is that it brings us a sense that human life bears God's image, and therefore must be respected, regardless of race, creed, color, gender or sexual orientation. And I don't want us to get to a society where we don't value and honor the sacredness of human life.

I think the 20th century has been very dangerous in that area. The 20th century has given us two words that I think we ought to listen to very carefully. One is the word holocaust, and the other is the word ethnic cleansing. You can't do a holocaust and you can't engage in ethnic cleansing unless you have decided that some people are not bearers of God's image, and therefore some people are expendable. I don't want to think that.

The second thing that I think Christianity gives us that it would be terribly important to lose, is that God's love is available to us all. God isn't bound by my tradition. God is not an Anglican, God is not a Christian.

God is the source of love calling all people into the fullness of what that love means. I see that love particularly illustrated in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and so he is for me my doorway into the holy. But I want all people to know of the infinite love of God, and I don't want anybody to be outside the boundaries of that love.

And the third thing that I think Christianity gives us is that the goal of the Christian life is not that we become religious or conformist; the goal of the Christian life is that each of us becomes who we are.

So I have a sense that our journey into God is also a journey into our selfhood. And I'd like to offer those three gifts to my world from within my Christian perspective.

But let me say one final thing, I could never be anything but a Christian. I journey into the mystery of God through the doorway that I call Jesus of Nazareth. But my responsibility I think is to go into that tradition as deeply as possible. To transcend its limits that we human beings have placed upon it.

The primary difference between a Presbyterian and Anglican, a Roman Catholic - and well what other traditional - a Lutheran lets say, is which country in Europe did we get filtered through. Jesus didn't know there was a Germany or a Scandinavia or a Scotland or an England, or a southern Europe or an Ireland. Those are our distinctions.

Now I want to journey so deeply into the tradition that I lose those human barriers that we have placed upon the boundaries of our tradition. And I want to transcend the limits of Christianity, but no on its edges at its core, I want to find its essence and I want to come out of that, able to offer that essence to the world.

My hope is that those who grow up in a Buddhist world or a Hindu world or an Islamic world or a Jewish world will also go so deeply into their traditions that they will find their pearl of great price. And transcending their limits some day by God's grace we can sit down as brothers and sisters of the human race and share with one another the treasures and receive and give so that we will be mutually enriched. And I think that will be a whole different understanding, and that's what I hope we evolve into.

Yes.


Continued in the next post.