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by the Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong
I was raised in the evangelical Protestant wing of the Episcopal Church in the South. In that tradition, piety was encouraged and basic moral norms which governed honesty, truthfulness and personal integrity were clear. Indeed, those qualities were expected from those whose vocabulary was frequently punctuated with references to God and Jesus and filled with allusions to scripture.
I suppose we had charlatans who used religion for personal gain in that era, but they were not present in the evangelical orbits of my life. Robert Bruce Owens was my childhood minister (evangelicals were loath to use the title, "priest"). He was a tall, stately, dignified man of pious speech, a figure to whom flowed great admiration. Herbert Darrow was my Sunday School superintendent, a position that I did not know how to quantify. He was a man of some girth, who led the singing and the prayers at our opening Sunday School exercises before we adjourned to our classes. As far as I could tell, Mr. Darrow was also a minister. So from him I expected and received a positive stream of words and actions that reflected evangelical piety and integrity. Indeed, for me piety and integrity were not just the marks of evangelical Christianity, for I knew no other kind, but were the attributes which distinguished Christians from all others in my childish mind.
It has therefore been strange for me to discover within the evangelical wing of our church in my adulthood a hostility that is appalling and an absence of personal integrity that is both surprising and disappointing. If it had been only a single instance, I might not have noticed, but it has been a number of instances and they have all reflected the same mentality - the assumption that this tradition contains all truth, the need to diminish those who might disagree and a passion to be proven right which justifies acts which by the definition I grew up with seem dishonest and lacking in integrity .
The evangelical arm of the Episcopal Church is called Episcopalians United. They are part of the same group that helped to form a theological seminary in western Pennsylvania because they believed that every other seminary in America was wrong, liberal or infected with "secular humanism". This seminary considers overt and covert "Spong bashing" to be a letter sport. It has organized campaigns both to rescue the Bible from Spong and to cure homosexuals of their sickness. When this seminary agreed several years ago to sponsor jointly with The Witness magazine, an avowedly liberal publication, a conference designed to seek understanding if not agreement on the deeply divisive issues before the church today, it appeared to be a move toward recognizing the reality of pluralism and relative truth in the life of the church. Respect for each other as Christians, if not for each other's position, was to be the order of the day. But when this conference was concluded, at the insistence of some of its students, the Dean and President of this institution conducted a service of worship in the chapel designed to purge from the premises of the seminary the evil and demonic spirits left by their liberal guests. I find no integrity in that action.
Next came an experience at the Phoenix General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1991. Because tensions over issues were high, the House of Bishops agreed to go into an executive session intended to be conducted in strict confidence. In this session bishops, including myself, seduced by the promise of confidentiality, shared some very personal things about our lives and struggles as we wrestled with great controversial issues. Within thirty minutes of the close of the session in which I spoke, a priest who holds high office in the Episcopalians United organization came up to me and repeated almost verbatim the substance of my confidential remarks. Clearly the boundaries of our common life as a House of Bishops had been violated and the violation had come from the evangelical side of the aisle. The same thing occurred three years later when an evangelical bishop leaked a confidential study document on human sexuality from the House of Bishops to the Episcopalians United, who distributed it widely.
In publications from that same organization, signed by its executive secretary, the rhetoric and hate heaped upon homosexual persons in an attempt to solicit contributions to assist in their holy war to save the church from the hated liberals have been so virulent as to be embarrassing to the whole church. Even Jerry Hames, the editor of the non-controversial national church newspaper known as Episcopal Life, felt it necessary to call these attacks excessive.
In 1992 I went to the Virginia Theological Seminary to be part of a debate with a well-known bishop who is clearly identified with the evangelical point of view and with the Trinity School for Ministry in Pennsylvania. Both of us signed releases so that the debate could be recorded and the tapes sold through the facilities of the parish where my debating opponent had once served as rector. The rules of the debate were clear; time limits were set; questions to the debaters were to be equally divided. Each could then comment on the answer given by the other and then there was to be a closing statement by each participant. The debate went well. The level of audience involvement was high. The opposing points of view were clear and well-defined, at least until the closing statements. In my opponent's closing statement, he tried to be cute, to make jokes based upon the titles of some of my books and to insult me personally. It was not very effective, nor was it well-received.
A few weeks later I received a copy of the audio tapes from a member of this bishop's diocese. This person pointed out that a new ending had been added to the debate. I confronted the bishop with the fact that this was basically dishonest, and he agreed to remove his "revised" version of the debate from the market; an action I am certain he would not have taken had he not been caught.
A bit later in the summer of 1993, I agreed to engage in a public debate, hosted by the Anglican Cathedral in Vancouver, with a leading English evangelical. Again the rules of the debate were clear and mutually agreed to by the participants. Each of us was to give an opening statement. Each could respond briefly to the other's opening remarks. Then questions from the floor could be directed to each of us. Finally we each were to give a closing statement. I considered an expected audience of 1500 to be an important forum in which to present my ideas, and so had prepared my opening and closing statements with great care. When my opponent came to his closing statement, he did not appear to be prepared and much of his statement ended up being a disjointed personal attack on my integrity and scholarship.
Both of us had agreed that the debate could be published verbatim by the Regent College magazine known as Crux. Imagine my surprise when I received that publication and discovered that my opponent had written a new conclusion to the debate. He and Regent College sought to justify this abandonment of our agreement by suggesting that in my closing statement I had brought up new ideas to which my opponent had not had an opportunity to respond. They did not discuss this change in our agreement with me and, in this exercise of trying to win public relations points, both my opponent and Regent College compromised honesty and integrity.
One of the false assumptions of some religious people is that they are in possession of the fullness of God's truth. They surround that illusion with the theological jargon of "the inerrancy of the Bible," the "infallibility of the Pope" and the "clear teaching of the church." This in turn justifies in their minds hostile, dishonest and sometimes killing behavior patterns that are perpetrated on those who do not accept their limited definitions of God’s truth. This is the same mentality that burns heretics at the stake, that excommunicates people with new ideas from the life of the church, that persecutes Jews and other religious minorities, that starts religious wars, and that in extreme cases, justifies murder at abortion clinics. Because this religious mind-set covers their hostile behavior with religious words and pious phrases, people are loathe to call their behavior for what it is. But the facts of history reveal that Christ is never served by hostility, the church is never helped by dishonesty, nor is the gospel ever served by sacrificing integrity. For human beings, the reality is that the ultimate truth of God is always beyond our grasp and can be approached only in the tension of dialogue. No human being will ever perceive God or God's truth except "through a glass darkly." If religious people, holding as we do nothing but partial truth, act as if our partial truth is ultimate truth, and proceed to make imperialistic and exclusive claims for our version of truth, then we become idolatrous. Life dedicated to serving idolatry is always destructive. God and God's truth can only be served as we approach the awesome wonder and mystery of God with genuine humility. If the religious voices of our day could do that, the world would surely be a safer and more loving place in which to live. Beyond that, the cause of Christ which we hold so dearly would be more honorably served.
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