John Shelby Spong: midwife to birth a new faith

Catholic New Times, May 4, 2003 by Ted Schmidt

Of course, one cannot do justice to the bishop's sensitive, thought-out rendering in an article or an interview, but one can certainly attest to his erudition, comprehensive understanding of scripture and our ongoing reinterpretation of it within a shifting world view--post Darwin, Freud etc, from premodern to the Enlightenment to the postmodern world we now inhabit. Like Catholic theologians Thomas Berry, Diarmuid Omurchu et al, Spong situates his work within the new cosmology and new physics. Undoubtedly many believers will be rattled by this necessary reconstruction, much as they were in the shifting theological sands of Augustine's and Aquinas' times.

I found Spong to be quite careful with his Christology. He said: "I see Jesus as a God presence, a life through whom the kingdom of God is breaking into human history. He is the one in whom and through God is seen. That is the experience we need to embrace ... It is a delicate interpretive line one has to walk to separate experience from explanation."

As we concluded this part of our interview, Spong stated "the thing I can not give up is that I think God is real and I find my way to God in the Christ story."

I asked Spong whether in his critique of "mindless fundamentalism" he included his own president. His response was blunt: "I think he is giving Christianity a bad name and I do not think the world or my nation will survive eight years of this president. It is really frightening to me ... I think the American psyche is under attack today. We have had no memory of war on our own soil since the Civil War. Unfortunately, we have a cowboy in the White House. The way he deals with a threat to his psyche is to start firing in all directions ... what we have is a man who is not very bright and he is the pawn of a group of people a generation out of touch with reality."

Spong is raising serious issues for the Christian church and the packed houses (even with an Anglican bishop in attendance) that warmed to his message in Toronto, reflects growing disenchantment of "business as usual" in the established Christian churches.

However, both the bible and history are unkind to those who persist in looking back rather than forward.