And Malice to All: Episcopal Bishop's Parting Shots

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 13, 2000 | by Mark Tooley

He is America's most media-savvy bishop, and he finally has retired. John Shelby Spong of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, N.J., became a fixture on the Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey shows during the 1980s and, more recently, gravitated toward Larry King Live and Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher.

Thanks to a steady stream of books that for more than 20 years advocated acceptance of homosexuality, while speculating about the virginity of Mary and St. Paul's sexual preference, Spong became the most prominent theological provocateur of the religious left. Both the New York Times and 60 Minutes paid homage to Spong's retirement with lengthy goodbye stories.

In January Spong left his pastoral position and prepared for a stint as a lecturer at Harvard University. Perhaps emboldened by the close of his ecclesiastical career, Spong became even more outspoken in the closing months of last year. Not content to tout gay issues or express saucy skepticism about church tenets regarding Christ's resurrection or the afterlife, Spong now disputes theism itself.

"The God of the biblical story has become inoperative," Spong recently announced. "Theism became all but irrelevant with laws of cause and effect that governed the natural universe." He says he is trying to save the church by making it relevant but admits that if Christianity were to fade away, "I don't think it would be a disaster."

Spong's critique of the faith has never been particularly innovative. He thinks the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Freud have made belief in a personal God absurd. His argument against the deity is not any more creative than what might be expected from a typical village atheist with some education. Spong's New Testament theology merely is boiler-plate seminary liberalism that dates back at least a century.

What has made Spong unique and successful are three things. He is a bishop in the highly diminished but still prestigious Episcopal Church. His message is focused around homosexuality at a time when cultural leaders are intent on exploding any assumptions of a normal or natural sexual order. And, unlike most liberal church leaders, he does not pretend to be a nice man.

Spong does not waste time employing the buzzwords of full inclusion and mutual tolerance. He thinks traditional religious people are neurotic, stupid and "immature" -- and he does not hesitate to say so. Traditionalists do not merit dialogue; they need to be silenced or sent packing.

Last fall, Spong addressed the annual conference of the "Jesus Seminar" an association of clergy and academics who are as collectively media-savvy as he is in gaining attention for their "discoveries" about what no longer is valid in the Christian faith. It was, of course, a lovefest between the revisionist bishop and the revisionist academics who are united against a common enemy: the God of the Bible.

"A supernatural deity who lives beyond the sky watching over this planet keeping a record book for final judgment and periodically invading the earth has become unbelievable," Spong told an applauding crowd. "The security found in the Christian tradition that we are in possession of divine truth revealed directly by this theistic God in either Scripture or tradition has been obliterated."

Spong was not diplomatic. "The whole Christian enterprise is tottering," he insisted at the seminar, adding: "The Eastern Orthodox Church has become a benign irrelevance from another age." The Roman Catholic Church is dominated by priests who are "extremely conservative security-seekers who will not engage modern learning." Third World Christians are captive to a "premodern superstitious literalism." American evangelicals in the South and Midwest are running a "big business."

He refuses to go into Christian bookstores, which sell books that tell you how to "properly beat your children, how women should be second-class citizens and gay people should be bashed." Spong does not believe in traditional prayers, which are simply "adult letters to Santa Claus." He has likened the posture of praying on one's knees to a "beggar before someone who has the ability to give him his next meal, a slave before a master, a peasant before a king." And although he still wears a cross over his vestments, the stories of Christ's sacrificial death are "nonsensical."

Traditional Christians who still believe that Christ died for their sins are touting a Gospel that is "strange, bizarre and, finally, repelling." Amid laughter and applause, Spong opined that the world will not accept Christ's atoning death: "I don't care how many bloody hymns we sing in worship. These threadbare concepts are simply not worthy of eliciting worship. They have become grotesque." Spong wants the church to stop telling people they are sinners and "stop dumping the church's ancient pathology on modern people."

The fundamentalists will "finally go down in flames," he assured his audience, while liberals who are seeking to salvage parts of the traditional faith will "expire with a pitiful whimper." Unless Spong's "radical reformation" is accepted, "death appears to be Christianity's destiny." But if the church is to survive, then it must "abandon the mythological framework that portrayed Jesus as a visiting, saving divine figure."