by John Shelby Spong I find the mood of the Christian Church today to be alarming. There is a combination of ignorance, hostility and fear that seems to dominate its agenda. It was certainly apparent at the Lambeth Conference. But it was also present in the recent Vatican statement that informed Roman Catholics that they could no longer debate every debatable issue before the Church. It was present in the decision of the Southern Baptist Church to impose a literal patriarchal prejudice on its people by proclaiming that women must be subject to the will of men. These assertions represent a claim frequently heard in rightwing religious circles that somehow the whole truth of God has been contained in the narrow understanding of a particular religious group. Some people who appear never to have read either theology or the history of Christian thought are today making public theological pronouncements and seeking to place other people outside the boundaries of their uninformed definitions. Such statements would be laughable if it were not that these people are taken seriously and seem to be exerting political pressure. A religious mentality that wants to abolish a woman's right to choose, to impede the economic and ecclesiastical advancement of women and continue the abuse and oppression of homosexual persons is today united in seeking to force this strange negative agenda upon both the Church and the nation. These people appear to believe that Christianity is to be equated with a body of doctrine and dogma that emerged during the centuries that we call the Christian era. They assume that this doctrine and dogma are monolithic, that there has never been either a debate or a minority opinion expressed. Clearly that is not a learned or informed position. It is, rather, a response of fear, perhaps hysteria, but it is not reality. I have, for example, posed for debate in the Christian Church the issue that theism, as a way of talking about God, is dead, so a new way to speak of God must be found. I am amazed at how many people, including some bishops, have concluded from this that I no longer believe in God. What a travesty of incomprehension! If these critics were conversant with the development of theology, they would recognize that the need to define God outside theistic categories has been a part of the Church's theological debate since the 14th century. It was present in the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart. It came to full flower as Christians began to respond to the insights of George Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel in the 19th Century and Alfred North Whitehead in the early years of the 20th Century. A school of Christian thought known as "process theology" grew out of Whitehead and dominated the theological agenda of no less a place than the General Theological Seminary in New York City. A learned and universally respected theologian at that seminary, named Norman Pittenger, made process theology a part of our Church's life for a good part of this century. Today's bishops, even the ultra conservative ones, who attended General Seminary for their training had to interact with the thought of Norman Pittenger whether they remember it or not. Process theology does not present God in a theistic form. Defining God as "The Ground of All Being" instead of as a Being, supernatural in power and dwelling beyond the sky, was a contribution brought into the public theological domain in the 40's and 50's by a German Reformed theologian, named Paul Tillich, who taught at both Union Seminary in New York, and Harvard Divinity School in Massachusetts. In that era Tillich was without theological peer. Dr. Tillich would not use personal words to talk about God, not because he believed God to be impersonal, but because the God he sought to speak about was so far beyond the categories of the personal that he found personal words offensively inadequate. So it was not a Being, but the Ground or Source of All Being, that became Tillich's definition of God. A thorough-going Tillichian, named Dr. Clifford Stanley, taught theology at Virginia Seminary in Alexandria for a quarter of a century (1931-35 and 1946-70), emphasizing these Tillichian concepts. Perhaps his students, who are now senior members of the clergy, did not understand what either Tillich or Cliff Stanley was saying. Perhaps they did not know how to process this with their Sunday school education, so they simply refused to hear it or quickly abandoned it. John A. T. Robinson, the Bishop of Woolich, in the 60's made this non-theistic definition of God the major thrust of his best-selling book entitled Honest to God, and then followed this with a more formal treatment of non-theism in a book entitled The Human Face of God. In any event it is strange indeed to listen to critics make assumptions about this concept as if they never heard of it before or as if their magical view of God as the supernatural manipulator was the only view of God.
The great majority of the negative letters came from ordained people who fancied themselves "defenders
of the faith." They were disturbed that I appeared to be challenging the formulas by which they had come to
define and to envision God. They believed, I was led to assume, that shouting more loudly the old pious cliches
was all one needed to do to proclaim the Gospel in this secular age. Some of these letters were violent, some were
threatening. Many of them called for me to resign or to be removed from the Church. One suggested that I be shot
at dawn. I found this hostility both fascinating and chilling. It was fascinating in that it revealed that traditional
religion is clearly part of people's (especially ordained people's) security system and that when this system is
disturbed, violence, hostility and fear flow out in destructive ways. It was chilling to realize that these people
had the capacity to identify this hostility with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and think that by violent and threatening
words, they were somehow serving God's cause. That is, of course, what has been behind every religious act of persecution
throughout the ages. Indeed, that is the stuff of religious wars, religious intolerance and inquisitions. To my
deep regret this hostile negativity is rampant in the Church's life today.
I have, through this latest book, called for a new Reformation in the Christian Church. I have suggested that because of the knowledge explosion of the last 500 years, the old formulas of our religious past no longer carry the meaning that they once carried and, if unaltered, will inevitably be dismissed as irrelevant to our life. The proper response to that call or even to that insight is not to get angry or to seek to suppress me or anyone else who dares to raise questions, but rather to look at these issues openly and honestly and to address them rationally. My call to the Church is a call to move beyond threat and name-calling, to recognize that gigantic number of modern men and women who have already voted with their feet by abandoning organized religion, and to seek to reach them, while avoiding the temptation to be seduced by those noisy current religious voices who are sure that they represent the authority of God. This Reformation that I speak of needs to be public so that the disaffected can see that the Christianity they have rejected is not all there is to the Christian faith. That means that those who identify with this Reformation must also be willing to bear the attack of the threatened religious establishment. I hope there is a sufficient core of thinking Christians left who can make this Reformation a reality. Only time will tell. But I am certain that if there isn't, then Christianity is doomed for the anti-intellectual voices of the religious right today will never revive the Christian faith for that growing majority of those who have given up on organized religion. The choice before the Church is so clear to me. It is either a radical Reformation or a slow but inevitable death. At the dawn of the Third Millennium I urge our clergy and people to vote for Reformation.
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