My Beef with John Spong!
My posting of a selection of Ben Meyer's review of John Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious has led to a spirited debate on these pages. And if you read the comments it might appear that I'm pretty conservative -- which from other things I've written here might seem a bit odd. I'm not a biblical literalist in that I take everything as historically or scientifically accurate (I'm not an inerrantist!!!; No, indeed, no I'm not an inerrantist!!!! -- does that sound like someone speaking to something else recently?)
That being said, I find Spong way too dismissive of the Christian tradition -- a kind of throwing the baby out with the bath water. He seems to find Christianity sterile and passe. Here is where I separate him from Marcus Borg -- Borg seems to understand that there's more to the story that meets the eye.
As I've been pondering this issue --maybe because I don't want to be misunderstood -- I've been looking for a response to Spong's principle objections. What I've found is a response provided by the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that dates back to 1998. Spong had then posted on the Internet a series of 12 Propositions for debate -- ala Luther's Theses. Williams, then Bishop of Monmouth, took him up and offered a gentle but strong rejoinder -- one that in large part I agree with. For the complete set of theses plus rejoinder, click here.
One of Spong's points is that "theism" is no longer tenable, but as Williams points out Spong (at least in his 12 Theses) doesn't define what this theism is that he no longer finds tenable.
Here is the statement of Spong --
- "Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found. "
Williams answers:
- To answer that requires us to look a bit harder at the theses themselves. In a way, the first of them indicates where the trouble is going to come: for there are at least three quite distinct senses of theism current in theology and religious studies, and it is none too clear which is at issue here. . . .
Williams continues on from there, but that gives you the starting point. What I want to do is point to this:
It is no great pleasure to write so negatively about a colleague from whom I, like many others, have learned. But I cannot in any way see Bishop Spong's theses as representing a defensible or even an interesting Christian future. And I want to know whether the Christian past scripture and tradition, really appears to him as empty and sterile as this text suggests.
It seems he has not found life here, and that is painful to acknowledge and to hear. Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.
Like I said, I think that Spong jettisons too much and leaves us with a God who really doesn't matter much, because this God really isn't at all involved in life as we know it. I think it's possible to rescue Jesus from Fundamentalism and be left with nothing worth keeping.
Now I could easily be misreading Spong, but I find much wisdom in this response by Rowan Williams. My recommendation is to follow this link and read both the theses and the response carefully.
Comments
Just kidding. Thanks for the clarification.
However, I don't think his definition of the theism that he critiques is all that different from Borg's term "supernatural theism", which Borg also critiques. The idea of God as an external agent who intervenes omnipotently in the world is something that both Borg and Spong reject--and so do process theologians, by the way. And my guess is that Williams would disagree just as much with Borg as he would with Spong on this point, since Williams makes it clear that he believes in a God who intervenes in the world from the outside in an omnipotent fashion.
I have a lot of beefs with Spong, but not the same ones that Williams does. And I have to say that I don't have a lot of respect for Williams these days, considering his moral bankruptcy on the gay issue in his church. Leaving that aside, though, I find that a lot of what Williams writes in that article in his defense of omnipotence sounds as vague and incoherent as Spong's description of what he wants to replace theism with. I think Spong has it right about the fundamental problems of a God acting as an interventionist from the outside.
Where I think Williams is wrong is when he says this:
Perhaps the underlying theme in all this is that if you don't believe in a God totally involved in and totally different from the universe, it's harder to see the universe as gift; harder to be open to whatever sense of utter unexpectedness about the life and death of Jesus made stories of pregnant virgins and empty tombs perfectly intelligible; harder to grasp why people thank God in respect of prayers answered and unanswered.
He seems to be assuming that if you reject the traditionally theistic conception of God, then that means that God isn't involved in the world. But this simply is not the case. Process theologians believe that God is intimately and actively involved in the world at each moment; but they reject the concept of omnipotence. From what I have seen, Spong never mentions process theology, which I guess illustrates why I am neither in Spong's camp nor in Williams's. But I think Spong is right that religion needs to take into account that we live in a post-Enlightenment world. Spong's failings are his arrogance and his vagueness in what he really seems to be advocating. Williams, who has snubbed the American gay bishop in the Anglican communion, has demonstrated that he himself doesn't really know what direction he wants to take the Christian faith in.
I'm not a "Barthian" necessarilly anymore, but I do feel the need to affirm more transcendence than does the Process Theologian.
With Spong it seems that he's abandoned so much of Christian theology there's not much left, which is fine for him, but is it Christian anymore? Now here me, I'm not saying he's not a Christian, what I'm saying concerns his theology.
Thank you though for continuing the conversation.
His heroes -- John A.T. Robinson and the Death of God Theologians of the 1960s -- whom he seems to think didn't get their due. His appeal to Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity is in line with the earlier interpretation -- which most Bonhoeffer scholars reject.
My advice -- if you want a progressive treatment of the life of Jesus -- one you'd want to give to a non-religious person -- stick with Borg!