Confessions of a believer in exile

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Peter A. Young

by Peter A. Young

For most of my adult life, I have lived at the edges of traditional Christianity, seeking a spiritual home in one protestant church or another, yet never fully comfortable with theological language. Early on, it became clear that what I was hearing was not mixing particularly well with what I was thinking. I remember in my late teens being stunned when a Presbyterian minister, during a hot summer service, asked parishioners in the back row to close the door, since Jesus had just taken a seat among them. Everyone turned around, presumably to determine where the Savior had decided to sit. I also remember a popular Welsh minister holding his congregation in thrall with a tale of a young boy who, when he wandered from home and fell off a cliff, was saved by God in the form of a stray branch that caught and held him long enough for the local fire department to rescue him. God talk from the pulpit was as persistent as it was incomprehensible. Although I loved that lyrical phrase from John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son. . . -" I was at a loss to comprehend the meaning and reality of both God and Son. I was thus easily persuaded by John A. T. Robinson's controversial 1963 book, Honest to God, that, among other things, "we should do well to give up using the word 'God' for a generation, so impregnated has it become with a way of thinking we may have to discard if the Gospel is to signify anything" (7, 8).

In time I became what Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong describes in his latest volume, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, as a "believer in exile," one who "wants to believe but who increasingly lives in exile from the traditional way in which Christianity has heretofore been proclaimed" (20). Not surprisingly, many Episcopal bishops and priests find the book offensive. Reviewers in the religious press make no bones about their considerable distaste for the views of the controversial Bishop of Newark. Some feel sorry for him; a few pillory him for "downgrading the church"; and others, like Robert William Duncan, the Bishop of Pittsburgh, see him as a counterfeit "errant brother," a "shepherd-become wolf" who sows "pain and confusion" among "my people."

My reading of Why Christianity Must Change or Die led me to wonder if the reviewers and I have in fact experienced the same book. What I found inspiring, they found reprehensible. Where I found confirmation, they found heresy. Where I discovered language to which I could relate, they found distortions and falsehoods.

As a Christian struggling to understand the contemporary meaning of ancient language, I have never been particularly comfortable reading the creeds, which speak of Christ's coming down from Heaven, His descending into Hell, and His ascending into Heaven. The Gospel writers had no problem envisioning such cosmological comings and goings. In those days, all manner of human/divine activities were read in the movement of the heavens. But I do, and so does Spong, who begins by picking the creeds apart, questioning the meaning of "God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, and Jesus Christ His Only Son, Our Lord"; he concludes that the words of the Apostles' Creed, and the later formulation known as the Nicene Creed, were "fashioned inside a worldview that no longer exists." In fact, the creeds are "quite alien to the world in which I live." Urging the church to start a dialogue with those who can no longer accept "premodern theological concepts," Spong suggests that "the time has come for the Church to invite its people into a frightening journey into the mystery of God and to stop proclaiming that somehow the truth of God is still bound by either our literal scriptures or our literal creeds" (21).

In a letter I once wrote to a Presbyterian minister, with whom I was acquainted, I questioned how a loving God could allow a bolt of lightning to strike a child, disease to conquer life, good people to die, and bad people to prosper. "What kind of God would allow these things to happen?" I asked. "Can one be a Christian and not believe in such a God?" My own guess at the time - I never did get an answer from the minister - was that, Job notwithstanding, God was not out there anywhere or everywhere, that God was not an external presence but more likely a stirring within each of us, a love force whose perfect human manifestation had been Jesus of Nazareth.

Spong argues that theistic thinking was born at the exact moment when human self-consciousness first emerged from the evolutionary process, that it became the inevitable human response to the terrors of self-consciousness. "Powerful divine figures could also be placated, bargained with, flattered, or appeased," he writes. "Frail and frightened human beings thus could ingratiate themselves with these external powers so that instead of being victimized by them, they could move the deity to protect or spare them instead" (52). Contending that "human beings have evolved to the place where the theistic God concept can be and must be cast aside," Spong searches for "another God language," enlisting support from the likes of Alfred North Whitehead ("the divine process coming into being within the life of this world") and Paul Tillich (for whom God was "Ground of Being," an "internal reality that, when confronted, opened us to the meaning of life itself") (63, 64).