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John Shelby Spong
Retired Episcopal Bishop; Author, A New Christianity for a New World
On September 11, a new world came searingly into our consciousness. Moving relentlessly from the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to anthrax, this new world has been unavoidable. It resulted in two primary and deeply emotional responses. One was a rush to patriotism. Flags spurted forth across this land, on houses, in yards, on autos, in businesses, on bicycles, and on lapels. Even the tattoo industry enjoyed a bull market as people came forward asking the American flag be tattooed onto some part of their anatomy.
This amazing rush to patriotism is not just understandable, it's appreciated. We love this nation. We cherish the promise of freedom that this nation conveys to us. We treasure our liberty and we struggle for justice for all. We rise as a people to defend these, our values, when our values are attacked. So, the surge to patriotism is understandable, but also dangerous.
It became impossible, for example, to debate foreign policy for a period of time, lest one appear to be critical of one's government and, therefore, unpatriotic. People like the writer Susan Sontag, or comedian Bill Maher of the late night comedy show "Politically Incorrect," discovered that freedom of speech was a value not fully appreciated when fears are rampant. With Bill Maher, it was particularly galling, for his crime was to suggest that politicians were using the wrong word when they described the terrorists as cowards. It was more than some of his sponsors could tolerate. Hopefully this is just a bit of hysteria that will pass with the crisis.
Rush to Religion
Churches, synagogues and mosques were filled on the next Sabbath or Sunday following September 11. It looked like Easter or Passover. Religious spokespersons were frequently interviewed by the nation's media. The religious viewpoint they espoused, however, was strangely antiquated. Increasingly it sounded hollow, almost unbelievable. These people did not seem to recognize that the god to whom they referred had ceased to be a believable god in our day. Few of them seemed to realize that Christianity has also witnessed its dark times as being as imperialistic and as destructive as they were accusing the fundamentalist Muslim terrorists of being today.
Parts of Christianity and the Muslim terrorists both claimed that they have the only truth. Each feel compelled to impose that version of truth on all other people. Some of us Christians claim to have an infallible pope. Others claim to possess an inerrant Bible, apart from which no one can be saved. Evil is not far removed from these claims. When we say that all we are doing is serving the ultimate truth of our religion, that is exactly what the terrorists were saying. They are destroying the enemies of their God, Allah.
We need to remember that the condemnation of science, that started the science/religion battle in the Western world, was a stance that Christianity gave us in the days of Galileo and even Darwin. We condemned Galileo on the basis of a text in the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua. It's a strange text. Joshua was defeating his enemies. The battle was going very well, but the sun was beginning to go down and Joshua's enemies would be able to escape under the cover of darkness. Joshua demanded that God stop the sun in the sky, says this text, creating the first instance of daylight savings time, for the sole purpose of allowing him to kill more of his enemies. Not a very noble purpose for God to manipulate the whole universe. And yet, that was the text used to condemn Galileo. Because if God could stop the sun from rotating around the Earth, it proved that that's exactly what the sun did and, therefore, the Bible was wrong and Galileo was right.
I was gratified that in 1991 the Vatican issued a statement in which they said they now believe Galileo was correct. It was 400 years too late, but better late than never.
Christianity has been a force in many places it still is a force against the full citizenship of women and their equal participation in the life of the church. Christianity has also been the source of a virulent anti-Semitism that is still the darkest side of our Christian history. We tend to look back at Adolf Hitler not realizing that he was fed by the writings of Martin Luther and other church fathers like Tertullian, Jerome and Polycarp. The greatest battle going on before September 11 in every Christian church in America was an internal battle to justify the church's continued rejection and hostility toward gay and lesbian people. We have created our victims out of our religious imperialism.
So, when people ask me why I am proposing a new Christianity for a new world, I point to these things and to the things that they reflect something other than what it seems to me to have been the purpose for which Christianity was designed. When I wrote my autobiography a year or so ago, entitled Here I Stand, I chronicled the fact that I had to struggle in my life to find a Christianity of integrity, love and equality, because the church in which I was raised, in North Carolina, taught me that segregation was the will of God. It taught me that women were created by God not as equal human beings, but only as male helpmates. It taught me that all religions other than my own religion were evil or pagan and that I should try to convert them and that the Jews especially were evil because they were Christ killers. My church taught me that homosexuals were either mentally sick or morally depraved and had been condemned by God in holy scripture, and so it was appropriate for Christians to condemn them.
Perhaps it should not be so strange that we discovered on September 11 that religion, all religion, has a dark side. This time, we were the victims. But we Christians have also been perpetrators of enormous violence against other people throughout history.
God and Fate
A second religious dimension that could not be avoided after September 11 was the religious illusion taught in the scriptures and church history that God was in charge of this universe, that purpose and meaning, not chance and randomness, were the realities in which we lived. That became hard to believe when good and bad died indiscriminately in a terrorist attack. The only thing the victims in this terrorist attack seemed to have in common was that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. They had chosen the wrong flight. They happened to work on the wrong floor of the World Trade Center.
Perhaps the most poignant story was that of one company who planned to move to New Jersey on September 1, but the contractor had not finished the renovation of their new headquarters. They postponed the renovation until the first of October. Half of the employees of that company are missing. Randomness, chance. Not purpose. Not controlling meaning.
Where was this supernatural god who was supposed to reward goodness and punish evil as we have taught for so long? Where was this god who was supposed to watch over us and to protect us? We need to face the fact that this god died on September 11. In academic circles, God had been terminally ill for at least 500 years. But many could not bring themselves to admit that. Even when people stop believing in this god, they continue to believe in believing in this god. The two are not the same. There's a vast difference.
The sickness of this deity began in the 16th century when the advance of knowledge first destroyed this god's home. We believed that this god lived just above the sky. Ancient people thought the stars were slits in the canopy that separated heaven from earth so that God could look down upon this world and keep the record books up to date. If you wanted to misbehave, you should pick a cloudy night.
But that's not the world we live in. We no longer think the Earth is the center of the universe. That's what Copernicus and Galileo did for us. But they only moved the center to our sun. After a while, we learned that our sun was not the center of our universe either. Finally, we learned that the universe, which is still expanding, has no center. So what happens to the god who was thought to live just above the sky, invading the world periodically to accomplish the divine will?
Two years ago, the state of North Carolina was afflicted with a terrifying hurricane, Hurricane Floyd. A year after that, people were still saying, "What did we do to deserve this divine wrath?" They were still interpreting it in that manner. After I heard that three or four times I said, "Well, you did elect Jesse Helms five times, but I don't believe God operates like that."
But that's the way the ancient mindset worked. If you were ill, God punished you. That was before we learned about germs, viruses, tumors and leukemias. Then we developed vaccinations, antibiotics, surgical procedures and radiation and we discovered a remarkable thing: they work just as well on saints as on sinners. Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa respond in the same way to radiation. It has nothing to do with this god punishing or rewarding. God began to sink beyond the sunset of our consciousness.
Where is God?
We now know that our sun is one star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars, in a universe that has 125 billion galaxies. So where is God? That god who is going to protect, that god who watches over? What happened to this god when Sir Isaac Newton discovered how ordered the natural laws by which our world operates are, squeezing as Newton did the space that miracle and magic were once thought to occupy? What happens to our claim that human life is created in God's image and is, as the Bible says, just a little lower than the angels, when we discover with Charles Darwin, that the fact is that we are just a little higher than the apes? It's a very different perspective and one which the organized Christian Church has never fully embraced.
What happens, particularly when we recognize on the other side of Charles Darwin, that we weren't created in a finished and perfect manner? That we came into being as single cells in the midst of the seas perhaps three to three and a half billion years ago? And that we have never fallen from a good creation into the evil of our humanity we have simply emerged? How can you tell the Christian story in the traditional way, as God's act of rescue of the fallen so that we could be restored to what we have never been? You can't be rescued if you have not fallen, and you can't be restored if you have never been that to which restoration is promised.
After Darwin, we learned that so much of our religious language is not only neurotic but also childlike. It encourages immaturity. It encourages passive dependency. Religion has actually been a force acting to retard human maturity. Maybe we could avoid that before September 11, but I do not believe we can avoid it now.
With Albert Einstein, Christianity had to enter a world of radical relativity. It sounds strange now, in the midst of overwhelming horror, to listen to religious leaders trying to defend the lost sense of rationality about our universe and trying to explain why the supernatural God allows such pain and such evil. Or, in some cases, why God actually causes it for we had to listen to that. Some of those religious explanations were so gauche that people were repelled. Even Mr. Fleischer, the spokesperson for the Bush administration, rebuked a religious leader for his excessive negativity. Jerry Falwell was quite sure that he could explain the mind of God. God had visited this wrath upon our nation because this nation harbored Falwell's enemies, which he identified as abortionists, homosexuals, feminists, pagans and, of course, the members of the ACLU.
Billy Graham's daughter was not much more profound. "We had invited this destruction from God," she said, "out of our values and our institutions and our schools because we had removed God from all of these institutions." God had withdrawn and was not around to guard and when the terrorists struck.
The Old Christianity
When I suggest that we can no longer think of God as a supernatural being, living somewhere beyond the sky, when I say that the skies are empty and that God is no longer believable, many people hear me saying that there is no God, because that's the only concept or definition of God that they have. Even the English language seems to lend itself to that point of view: If you are a theist, you believe that there is a being supernatural with power beyond this world who affects the causes of human life in this world; if you are not a theist, says our language, the only possibility is to be an atheist.
September 11 made that theological dilemma unavoidable. So many have had to live with the shock of realizing that they are alone that chance and randomness are realities in our lives and that no one is safe. That is also why I propose a new Christianity for a new world. The old Christianity will die. It has no life left in it. Indeed, Christianity has been reduced in our day to two separate movements. One is what I would call a right-wing fundamentalism which has both a Catholic and a Protestant side and which says, "I will close my mind to the realities of my world and I will continue to shout my religious slogans louder and louder and louder, and I will tell my people they don't have to think." That will always appeal to frightened people.
But there is another thing going on in the world-at-large that the Christian church seems to ignore. A significant number of people have decided that the god they meet in church is simply not big enough to be God for the world they inhabit. They just sort of drop out. They become what I call "believers in exile," members of the fastest growing religious organization in the West: the church alumni association.
A New Ethics
I've tried to develop a vocabulary to enable us to begin to conceive of and talk about a god beyond the theism/atheism debate a Christ beyond incarnation, a concept of prayer that is something more than an adult letter to Santa Claus, which is what most prayer seems to be. I propose a basis for ethics not based upon an ancient code like the Ten Commandments, which is sexist to its core, the tenth commandment suggesting that you cannot covet your neighbor's wife. Nowhere in the Bible is there a prohibition against coveting your neighbor's husband. You just can't covet your neighbor's wife. The reason: When the commandments were given, only males were considered human enough to be part of the covenant community. The woman came into the covenant as the child of a father or the spouse of a husband, but she was property: "You shalt not covet your neighbor's wife nor his ox." At least the woman was above the ox. That same theme is present in the seventh commandment, the one that says you shalt not commit adultery, that seems so straightforward and so clear. Yet, you need to recognize that when the commandment, "You shalt not commit adultery" was put into the Ten Commandments, polygamy was the style of marriage, and a man could have as many wives as he could afford, because women were property. Three hundred years after Moses was supposed to have given the Ten Commandments, King Solomon had a thousand wives. I don't know what adultery means when a man has a thousand wives. If you have a thousand wives and still have some need to commit adultery, you've got a problem and may I suggest it's not just a moral problem.
A man having a sexual liaison with an unmarried woman was not guilty of adultery; he was guilty of a crime against that woman's father, for she was the property of her father. I don't believe we can base ethics on an ancient code written on tablets of stone, or even on a sacred page. Ethics must be grounded in life. Christian ethics must be based on whether or not this action, corporate or individual, enhances life or diminishes life, increases love or diminishes love, enhances being or denies being. A basis for ethics can be found in the midst of life without this supernatural appeal. I also tried to develop a concept of life after death that is not based upon reward and punishment. What I am proposing is a total revision of an ancient faith that I still dearly love: a new Christianity for a new world.
I cannot tell you who God is or what God is. I am not concerned about that, for neither can anyone else. It's the height of human folly to think that anyone can tell any other person who God is or what God is. All I can tell you is how I believe I have experienced God, and even there, I must be open to the possibility that I am deluded. But I don't think so. I experience God as the source of life, not a supernatural being up in the sky, but as that vital force of life that flows through the universe. And if God is the source of life, the only way I can worship God is by living fully. I experience God as the source of love, and if God is the source of love, the only way I can worship God is by loving wastefully, not stopping to say whether or not this person deserves that love. And I experience God in the words of theologian Paul Tillich, who did much to shape my thinking. I experience God as the "ground of all being," and if God is the ground of all being, then I worship God by having the courage to be all that I am capable of being.
And I'm a Christian. When I look at the life of Jesus of Nazareth, I see a life so fully lived that I believe I sense the presence of the source of life in him. I see a love so wastefully shared that I believe I see the source of love in him. I see one who has the courage to be all that he is, under every set of circumstances. So I believe I perceive the ground of being in him. And I want to be a disciple of this Jesus, but a disciple of this Jesus does not mean that it is my compulsion to go out and convert everybody so that they will look like me and act like me. I would love for the church to get out of the conversion business and out of the evangelical business, out of the missionary business. Most missionary efforts are imperialistic, imposing one religious and cultural system upon another.
I do think that I have a responsibility as a disciple of this Jesus to live my life in such a way that I can help to build a world in which every human being has an opportunity to live more fully and love more wastefully and to be all that human being has the possibility of achieving, in the infinite variety of God's humanity, whether our skin is black, brown, yellow or white, whether our gender is male or female, whether our sexual orientation is gay or straight, bisexual or transgendered, to call all people in the world into the fullness of life, the fullness of love, the fullness of being. If we can begin to address the Christian faith to those issues, and to find those conclusions, then I think there will be a reformation and a renaissance, perhaps not of the kind of Christianity that we knew in our childhood, but a Christianity that will call us to a new humanity. For if anything is obvious after September 11, it is that if we do not find a new way to be human, we will finally annihilate one another.
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