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Not long ago, Bishop Spong of the Episcopal Church created a bit of a stir with his twelve theses. He considered his theses the beginning of a new reformation, equal in weight to the work of Martin Luther. At that time it seemed to some that this was the work of a theological idiot. But this is not the case. His thinking is superficial and simplistic, but he is not a complete idiot. All he has done is to state in a provocative and flamboyant fashion what he learned in seminary. In fact, the substance of his ideas are held by respected theologians and taught at a number of Episcopal seminaries. He has simply expressed their ideas in ways that are crude, arrogant, and offensive. But he has not deviated from their substance. He belongs to a tradition, the liberalism of Paul Tillich. He thinks this tradition will win out in the end, and one step in that victory is to take these ideas out of the academy and into the pew. That is his mission, and as these ideas win out in the market place, the new reformation will be complete. In the traditional understanding of that word, I [Spong] am not a theist. I do not believe that I have been a theist since the time that my theological life first began to be shaped by the aforementioned Christian scholar named Paul Tillich in the early fifties. Tillich and his fellow academicians trained a generation of clergy, but they themselves remained in the theological centers of learning, where they talked about this theological revolution only to one another. They did not worry about how their concepts affected the ordinary believer, the person in the pew, or even the ordained one who interacted daily with the people of the pews.(1)My goal in this short essay is to show that Spong is not an aberration. I will do so by comparing his twelve theses to the thought of Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Macquarrie. All three are influential theologians within the Episcopal Church. I will begin by stating Spong's twelve theses. 1. Theism, as a way of defining God is dead. So most theological Godtalk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found. 2. Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt. 3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is preDarwinian mythology and postDarwinian nonsense. 4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. 5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a postNewtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. 6. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed. 7. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history. 8. The story of the Ascension assumed a threetiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age. 9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time. 10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way. 11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior. 12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination. Spong's theses can be divided into two aspects. Some of the theses reflect substantive theological content, such things as God and how God acts in the world. Other aspects are simply Spong's perverse addendum. The former reflect the theological view of his mentors, the latter are simply his grandstanding and can be ignored. In reference to thesis number one, Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Macquarrie all reject traditional theism. They are panentheists. In spite of claims to the contrary, panentheism cannot distinguish God from the world or from nothing. These theologians also hold that revelation is not known by the categories of thought that normally apply to objects, and therefore, Spong gets the idea that "most theological Godtalk is today meaningless." What is being said by the theologians just mentioned, however, is that the concrete objective content of Godtalk is supplied by the self, while the mystical feeling of the talk is supplied by "God." As a result, they can have no real doctrine of the incarnation which is thesis two. For thesis three, neither Tillich nor Macquarrie believe in an original perfect finished creation in a literal sense. Tillich, for example, views the Fall as the movement from essence to existence. For him, creation and fall are aspects of the present rather than events in the past. Nor do Tillich and Macquarrie believe in the Virgin birth, the miracle stories of the bible, the bodily resurrection and an empty tomb, nor in the ascension. This non-miraculous view, held by the liberal theologians and biblical exegetes, is expressed in theses three, four, five, seven, and eight. Schleiermacher may believe in some of the miracles, the few he cannot account for rationally. But these miracles are not the results of God's action within time. Rather, if they did happen, they are the results of Christ's potent Godconsciousness rather than God's act. In any case, these miracles, including the resurrection, are not essential to the Christian faith. In fact, they are an embarrassment. Only the figure of the earthly Jesus matters, for it is there we see a fully developed awareness of God, and that is all we need for salvation. Thesis six is simply grandstanding. Tillich and associates take every doctrine and reinterpret it in ontological or existential categories. They at least take the stories seriously, although they gut them of every element entailing a supernatural action of God. The entire Christian faith entails, among other things, the miraculous redemption of the body which is denied by the liberal theologians and exegetes. In six, Spong is probably thinking that God sending his Son to die for us is a form of childabuse. More grandstanding. Thesis nine follows logically from the perspective of Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Macquarrie since they do not believe that God's Word is objective and concrete. Rather, the content of every revelation is supplied by the self and thereby looses is eternal normative value. Therefore Scripture is a combination of two factors, a mystical intuition given concrete form by human beings. In Scripture, the concrete form is the habits, thoughts, way of life of an ancient people and no longer binding on us today. We in our time have the same mystical feeling and we supply the concrete meaning for the feeling. The liberal view leads to the belief that the diverse voices of community ambiguously blend to become revelation. The Presiding Bishop has made this the cornerstone of his public theology. This leads at once to Jesus being only one among many since the uniqueness of revelation lies on the human side of things and not the divine. Or, to put it another way, the human person of Jesus does not ultimately constitute the being of God, but rather, functions as a window into the Being of the ineffable God. There are other windows. Neither, Tillich, Macquarrie, or Schleiermacher believe that God acts objectively to affect particular events. Hence thesis ten is a logical conclusion of their thought. Thesis eleven is a combination of grandstanding, excessive language, and the usual demythologizing, since a literal objective reappearing of Jesus is impossible in the nonsupernaturalistic worldview of the liberal theologians. Thesis twelve is irrational since prior theses deny the reality of any kind of God capable of having an image in humans that leads to ethical consequences. There are those in the church who think they can have it both ways. They think they can be enlightened, scientific, persuaded by the "new" theology and exegesis, and keep the substance of the faith. They cannot. If anything, Spong shows us that. Anyone who faces that fact can ignore Spong as he is a lightweight, but one cannot ignore Schleiermacher, Tillich, and Macquarrie. They are powerful theologians, widely read in the Church. Hard study and reflection is required. At of this moment, I have written an introduction to Schleiermacher, as well as defined how he and other liberals differ from orthodoxy. More work, however, needs to be done. As Hooker once said, "The search for knowledge is a thing painful; and the painfulness of knowledge is that which maketh the Will so hardly inclinable thereunto. (I,vii,7) Even so, it wouldn't take long for most people to discover that the socalled new ideas bandied about by Spong and others are not new at all. Their ideas have been discussed in depth for almost two centuries, and even longer if we go back to Plotinus. For example, Barth is Schleiermacher's great opponent, and anyone dealing with the contemporary theological landscape should read him. How many have actually done this? Almost none. I've never met or read of a single liberal in the Episcopal Church who has read Barth in spite of the fact that, among theologians, he is recognized as liberalism's chief opponent. And of course, it is not simply a matter of reading, it is repentance, conversion, and receiving the power of the Holy Spirit. From what I can tell, only a few of the bishops and theologians of ECUSA have done their homework as "guardians of the faith." For that reason, it is not surprising that the Episcopal bishops did not censure Spong for his obvious heresies. You can't guard something if you won't or can't distinguish it from its counterfeits. 1. John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Harper; San Francisco, 1998, p. 174. The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D. August, 2002. |