THE BISHOP'S VOICE by John S. Spong The Rt. Rev. Rowan Williams is one of the Anglican Communion's brightest and most articulate bishops. Prior to his appointment as the Bishop of Monmouth in the Church of Wales, he had a distinguished academic career as a theological professor at Oxford. I have been enriched by his writings and by several personal conversations with him. I do confess to wondering whether his appointment to a small rural diocese might actually diminish the contributions he is able to make to the Church. I was delighted, however, that his academic credentials were now to be present in the deliberations of the bishops. We have far too few bishops with his kind of intellectual grasp available to lead this Church of ours. I have not known Rowan well but I have known him pleasantly. He has been a strong ally in the struggle for the full recognition and inclusion of homosexual persons into the life of the Church. He has championed that issue in the typically English way in private conversations with such people as the Archbishop of Canterbury. I have had the pleasure of discussing theological issues with him in his home on the campus of Oxford University. Through his recommendation I have been introduced to the writings of Bede Griffiths who, like me, probed some of the edges of Christian thought. Rowan located himself in a kind of Eastern spiritual tradition with Catholic overtones. That was not where I was, but it was a position of integrity and ancient lineage that had always been part of the kaleidoscope of Christian experience. I was happy to honor it and to learn from this man. Imagine my surprise then when I opened the Lambeth issue of The Church Times to discover what can only be described as an intensely personal and overtly hostile attack upon me written by Rowan Williams. His words included such phrases as "under-examined," "poorly thought through," "the sort of thing that might be asked  Why would a theologian of Rowan William's rank not speak to the problem behind the theses rather than assume that the theses themselves were my attempt to create a new religion? by a bright 20th century sixth former." He suggested that I must be ignorant of certain theologians that he found helpful, but who I think do not even address the issues I was raising. Normally, I would not respond to this kind of written anger, but this article was personal, not professional, an attack on my character and integrity rather than on my position. I tried to imagine what could have created such a level of personal hostility and wrath. The immediate occasion for this outburst was the publication of my twelve theses in The Voice last May and posted on the Internet for debate. These theses were, however, listed only in the barest of propositional form, without explanation, as issues which need to be examined as Christianity enters the third millennium. They were not a statement or summary of my position. Did he not recognize the apologetic problem that Christianity faced in this post-modern world? Is it not accurate to state that the Gospels written in the first century and the creeds which came into their final form in the fifth century inevitably employed pre-modern language and pre-modern concepts that no longer either translated or made sense in a post-modern world? Why would a theologian of Rowan Williams' rank not speak to the problem behind the theses rather than assume that the theses themselves were my attempt to create a new religion? Surely he recognizes that a literalized understanding of such things as the virgin birth or the cosmic ascension fly in the face of contemporary knowledge about both reproduction and the shape of the universe? He must see that the story of the cross interpreted by the earliest Jewish disciples in terms of the sacrificial lamb of Yom Kippur does not exhaust the possibilities for the atonement? Does not Mark's word "ransom" suggest that Jesus was understood as a human sacrifice made to an angry deity to pay the price of sin? What else could the word "ransom" mean? How credible is that as a call to worship at the dawn of the third millennium? A deity who requires a blood offering in our world is considered not just strange, but actually barbaric. The traditional Christian idea that human beings are victims of something called "the fall" and are thus born in sin was an ancient attempt to explain the reality of the shadow side of human life. It assumed that we once possessed a state of perfection which has been lost. But Charles Darwin presented us with a different way to view this reality by suggesting that emergence into higher consciousness while carrying the baggage of our evolutionary struggle to survive might be a better way to talk about sin. That Darwinian perspective has required Christians to find a new or different way to speak of the gift of salvation that does not portray Jesus as a divine rescue operation. To none of these issues did Rowan Williams contribute a single suggestion. He rather attacked the call to debate. Incredibly enough, for one who appeared so upset, Rowan seemed to be ignorant of the fact that, having made people aware of the problem by posting the theses, I then sought to address each of them in my book, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. There I defined my use of the word "theism," for example, and explained why I felt it had become an inadequate way to speak of God. Rowan complained in his article that I had not said which of three definitions of theism I was rejecting. Surely he did not expect a full discussion of the doctrine of God in the call to the Church to debate. If he had read the book, he would have found two chapters devoted to that subject. Not once in this article did Rowan Williams place his understanding of the Christian faith into dialogue with any one of my theses as I have done in this book. Instead, he used a wide variety of religious platitudes, designed to reassure those who might be disturbed by the issues that I believe lie before the Church, but which did little more than to fog up and obfuscate those issues. What he, in fact, did in his article was to speculate himself on what he thought I must have meant and then he declared that he has found these speculations "bankrupt." That is neither insightful nor does it have integrity.  If If Rowan Williams would like to debate the future of the Christian faith in a serious, rather than a name-calling, session, I would be pleased to accommodate him. When he talked about what he called the "empty tomb tradition," for example, he walked a fine line between a view of the resurrection as resuscitation and what he calls the theology of "a risen body." Most people would not grasp that distinction, so he could be heard to defend the physicality of the resurrection without in fact doing so. It is a familiar academic tactic. It allows academicians to be radical when speaking to academics and be perceived as orthodox when speaking to the Church at large. He does not seem to recognize that the people still in the Church at large, which I address every day of my life, are no longer responsive to the pablum that the Church has fed them for centuries and are demanding the strong meat of theological reality and academic credibility if they are going to continue to be believers. He seemed either unaware or unwilling to state openly that Paul's understanding of resurrection is that God raised Jesus into the Being of God, not that God raised him back into the life of this world from whence a cosmic ascension to return Jesus to heaven would be necessary. The idea of a body that emerged physically from the tomb, ate, walked, taught and finally physically ascended, did not enter Christianity until some sixty to seventy years after the end of Jesus' earthly life. Those ideas were not present in primitive faith tradition. Yet, the resurrection was the reality upon which the Christian faith was born. Searching for your critic's motive is not an easy or perhaps even a fair thing to do. Yet so out of bounds was this article that some speculation on that subject was impossible to avoid. In recent months the Church press has been rife with rumors that Rowan Williams had been blocked from the appointment to be Bishop of Southwark (South London) by the active opposition of England's evangelical party, who consider him far too liberal for their taste. At the Lambeth Conference these evangelicals had two major enemies: homosexuality, which they saw not only as evil but as condemned in their reading of scripture, and a well-published American bishop who had championed the full inclusion of homosexual people in the life of the Church and who had written about the need to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism. It would be quite a stroke of genius for someone in Rowan Williams' position to seek to regain evangelical favor by attacking quite personally these two standing evangelical targets. Perhaps the temptation was irresistable. It does need to be noted that his attacking article appeared at the opening of the Lambeth Conference and that when this Conference passed its hostile and rejecting resolution about gay people, I was told that there were only two English or Welsh bishops who voted against it. Rowan Williams was not one of them. Perhaps he sought in these two overtly negative actions to "deliberalize" himself and thus to reopen his closed path to higher ecclesiastical position. He would, in fact, be far more talented than most of those who have occupied the position of Archbishop of Canterbury in the past, but does this tactic have integrity? If Rowan Williams would like to debate the future of the Christian faith in a serious, rather than a name-calling, session, I would be pleased to accommodate him. I will meet him in Wales, in England, or in the United States at any time that is convenient for him. Such a debate might make a genuine contribution to the Church's future. I have already placed my personal wrestling with these questions, which I believe will determine the life or death of Christianity as we know it, into the public arena in Why Christianity Must Change Or Die. I invite Rowan to do the same. Then as fellow Christians we can debate the two competing points of view. I promise that I will not characterize his contribution as that of a "bright 20th century sixth former." --Return to Contents