Wait, so where is it that my worm dieth not again?
Well, I think there’s a contradiction inherent in your question. You make assertons about what God has “declared” based upon a book written by people. Maybe the human perception of god is just as subject to evolution and revision as are his perceptions of the physical universe.
God’s intervention does not have to be supernatural (and God doesn’t have to be YHWH). God’s interactions with humans can be read as the growing human awareness of a transcendent spirit. The transcendent can be defined however you want, since all definitions are only metaphors anyway, and the ultimate truth is unknowable. Even if we take a pantheistic view and define God as the universe, then the universe is aware and sentient and evolving because we are aware and sentient and evolving, and we have grown organically and naturally out of the universe. When we became aware, the universe became aware. We are the eyes and ears of the universe and the collective awareness of all human beings is the very mind of God. Our duty is to fight through the animal desires and fears and trivial hatreds which are a part of our physical natures and which distract us and blind us from our pure inner selves and the purpose of those selves-- to behold God for God. Once we kill or illusionary, egoistic selves we see that our true states are ecstatic, all-loving, unjudging and eternal. This is not to say that man is God. Man is the servant of God. The only way to serve God is to love. Love is the ego killer. Love is the only way to God intoxication. God interacts with man whenever man is moved by love.
Okay, here we go with my reactions to the 12 Theses. I’ll try to comment on others’ points in another post.
Well, in point of fact, there are no objective phenomena that can be pointed to that are the clear work of God, other than the fact of a structured nature operating by rules that we can indeed come to understand, which is IMHO His handiwork. Certainly for any of us who have come to know Him, He is a very real presence – but that subjective awareness of him cannot be made subject to objective analysis.
My reasoning for Spong using the Tillichian meaning of “theism” is from remarks he made at the lectures he delivered at my church last year and in Tarboro in 2001. And I do see the importance of discussing God not as exclusively an intellectual concept “out there” (transcendence) but as a reality present throughout His creation (immanence).
If somebody wants to hang the name “god” on the Ultimate Ground of All Being, far be it from me to stop them – but my sense is that He is very real, present, and personal, at least to some of us.
This builds on his first premise, so one must deny theism for this one to be valid. However, I don’t totally deny it – I affirm a God who is greater than anybody’s concept of Him.
But there’s an important point to be made here. The purpose of the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and the Chalcedonian doctrine of Christology was to provide an intellectual framework in which to grasp an observed fact (“observed fact” in the sense that it was the faith perception of the early Christians) – in Christ we see God. When we observe the man Jesus of Nazareth, we see what God is like literally brought down to Earth in human form.
This empirical datum is what gave rise to the theological concepts embodied in those two doctrines, when combined with the inevitable conclusions of what came to be seen as heretical teachings (e.g., God the Father died on the Cross; God the Son exited Jesus’s body at the Crucifixion so It never died, just the man Jesus; Christ was the first created thing).
The obvious conclusion to me is that if the doctrines make grasping the nature of God in Christ heavy going for anyone, they need to be thrown overboard, at least as a part of that person’s theological baggage. The avatar concept of Hinduism may be what works for some in its place.
In short, one does not deny that God was present in Christ, and experienced in the Holy Spirit – but one need not subscribe to the orthodox doctrines to explain how that happened.
Interesting point. How does the nature of man and of sin fit into a world where evolution is a fact? I simply “refuse to go there” – whatever may have been the origins of sin, the fact is that we live in a world where sin in the very strict sense – man’s inhumanity to man, and his separation from God – are evident. Proof of this can be found in the Pit or in your daily newspaper. That’s enough for me to deal with, without an analysis of what may have been the historical antecedents for the Eden story and how it ties into the anthropological nature of man.
Why this issue requires everyone to tie themselves into knots is something I’ve never fathomed. First off, sex is a part of the created order, not something nebulously sinful. The whole Genesis 1 creation story, regularly shredded on these boards for its supposed inconsistencies, testifies to this: “God created man in his own image…male and female he created them. God blessed them, saying ‘Be fruitful and multiply…’ And God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” (excerpted from Gen 1:27-31)
The earliest tradition of the church is that Luke knew Mary very well, meeting her after he converted to Christianity and becoming a confidant of hers. And it’s Luke who details the story of Jesus’s conception and birth (1:26-2:20); Matthew adds a snippet from Joseph’s perspective om 1:8-25. And Luke specifies in 1:1-4 that he did serious weeding of truth from legend in putting together the story of Jesus that he tells.
But the key point to me is that Jesus is not Elrond Halfgodden – He is wholly God and wholly man – a human being in whom the Son of God takes on human nature. In the words of a wise Christian, “He became like us that we might become like Him.”
When anyone plays games with Jesus the Only Perfect Man, Born of a Virgin, Tempted As We Are Yet Without Sin, what they’re doing is to draw a line of separation between Him and us that is the exact antithesis of why He underwent the Incarnation in the first place – He was one of us. He woke up with morning wood, he had to fart after eating beans; sometimes as He and His disciples walked along, He found it necessary to go behind a convenient bush and relieve His holy bladder. For the first couple of years of His life, it’s a fact that Mary changed God’s diaper after He pooped in it.
He’s a human being, as we are. And because He is that, He shows what we can be if we follow Him.
Glurr. Who gives a french-fried orthodox crap about whether they were “real miracles” or not? I’ve had several miracles happen in my life – a fair percentage of this board took part in the last one – and all of them were to me signs of God’s providence working through human beings. As I pointed out in the Polycarp on Literalism thread, John never once uses the Greek term for miracle – for him, all the “miracles” of the stories are semeia – signs of Who Jesus was.
The Parson Weems story about George Washington and the cherry tree is acknowledged as fiction – but that it circulated for so long shows that it was meaningful in encapsulating Washington’s integrity. (And we have the country we do in large measure because Washington, for all his humanness, was a man of integrity.) I’d suggest the same sort of reading for the miracle stories – they need not be taken as literal if they exceed your boggle quotient; the important point is what they say about who Jesus was.
When His4Ever finds this thread, she’ll wax eloquent on the Biblical doctrine of blood sacrifice as the payment for sin, as spelled out in the Old Testament. The entire substitutionary atonement doctrine is founded on that concept. But it’s hardly the only way to grasp what Jesus did.
Try this. Presumption: wayward man has wandered far from God and what God intended as His Way for man to live. (See comments on prevalence of sin being evident, above.) God arranges for His Son to be born a human being who could, by the way He lived and the way He died, convey what that Way is to humans.
In 1968, Joe and Mary Suburbia had only a vague concept of what the civil rights movement was all about – and it included the idea that there were these activists who were objecting to how people were doing things. They were good people; they felt that blacks ought to get an even break. But it didn’t affect them. Then the man who tried to live out nonviolence and satyagraha in an American, Christian way got shot in Memphis. And all of a sudden they woke up to reality. Thirty years later, gay rights advocates were not being heard – unless Joe and Mary had a gay family member, they thought it was another case of activists protesting but nothing that hit home to them. Then a kid got beaten up, tied to a lonely fence and left to die, up in Wyoming. And suddenly it became real to them.
Jesus died that we might come to know God and to have a real relationship with Him. “But if I am lifted up, I shall draw all mankind to myself.”
He wasn’t paying the balance off on our sinners’ credit accounts to a God who was ready to cancel our credit. He was trying to bring home to us that God loves us and wants us to love Him back, and gave all that He had to getting that message across. “This is how a man lives; this is how a man dies.”
Best answer I can give to this is to quote myself from over on the Pizza Parlor:
"The Gospels don’t give accounts of the Resurrection; they only tell the stories of people encountering Him after He rose. For the idea behind the Resurrection itself, we need to look at I Corinthians 15. And I agree with everything Paul said there. But key to me is “It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body.”
"Just as our modern use of “member” to mean that we affiliate ourselves with the local Baptist Church or Lions Club derives from Paul’s use of “member” (=organ of the body) to identify the individuals who are collectively the church as the Body of Christ, so our concept of the afterlife derives from what Jesus promised – and fulfilled! – in his teachings on the Resurrection. Please note how often reference is made to “the resurrection of the body.”
“For the Greeks and Jews alike, the spirit which survived bodily death was ineffectual and wispy, a wraith with no ability to do anything save maybe scare someone superstitious. To promise them survival after death was not offering them anything worthwhile; it was like giving you a bottle of air with nothing else in it – unless you’re on a spaceflight, that gift is useless. In contrast to this, our Lord promises that you will have life everlasting, and more abundantly than your mortal life. He was raised in a spiritual body capable of things that the mortal Jesus was apparently not (see any of the Resurrection accounts for evidence of this). And this body, transcending the need for sleep, use of the sanitary facilities, not subject to hunger, thirst, or weariness, is promised to us in the resurrection too. If I say that Jesus’s physical body was not resuscitated, I’m not talking that His body was less than He had been before, I’m affirming that He was more.”
I think this has already been hammered out enough. Acts 1:6-11 tells the story in terms of a physical vertical ascent. But what it signifies is not a physical act at all, but a spiritual one.
Au contraire. There is one basic principle, clearly found in Scripture and in fact taught by Spong himself, that spells out a standard for human behavior: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself. In these two commandments are all the Law and the Prophets.”
See the currently active prayer thread. No reason why it cannot be what he says it cannot – but that’s not what it’s intended to be.
This one I subscribe to completely. When Jesus excoriates the Pharisees, He’s ticked about a legalism that paints God as wrathful Judge, in the fear of whom one is supposed to avoid what will piss Him off. Instead He paints the picture of a loving Father who judges on the basis of what dwells in the hearts of his people, and whether their acts show kindness and love or rejection and hatred. Humans are incapable of keeping themselves alive and non-bored indefinitely without divine help – in fact, left to themselves they will find something to get into that burns out some part of their being. God offers to do what we cannot, and give us a new and richer, more fulfilling life, and one that continues indefinitely.
“And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Asked who’s your neighbor, he illustrates the answer with the parable of the Good Samaritan – and we don’t grasp how much the Jews of his day loathed the Samaritans. If Jesus were alive today, He’d be telling the story of the good Arab, who by the way happens to be gay.
As to point number three. . . .
Recently, a dear friend of my father’s died, a Russian Orthodox of profound devotion to his faith and his God. As he was dying, my father would spend weekends with him, discussing theology (and anthropology; my father, being agnostic, tends to interpret religious structures of how to interact with the divine as being metaphors for how people should interact with people). Dad wrote down the content of their conversations and shared it with me recently; I (personally) found it profoundly moving, as it was clearly (within my faith’s context) written as an offering of respect to the dead, and it was beautifully done. (I mentioned this to Dad, who agreed that it was such a gift.)
One of the major points of focus for their discussions was the meaning of Eden, and they came back to it several times. It’s worth noting that the Orthodox point of view on the matter of “The Fall” is significantly different from that put forward by the Western churches, owing far more to Pelagius than it does to Augustine. (And far more in keeping with my personal beliefs about “The Fall”, which run more or less like, “If this mythological event was ever an issue between man and the divine, the only way it can be still an issue today is if Christ failed.” And in the Orthodox church, an unbaptised baby who dies goes to heaven.)
Anyway. My understanding of the Eastern church is somewhat fuzzy at this point (though I have a series of books on its history that I intend to read sometime soon), but it’s my impression that the focus, rather than reconciliation with God, is upon joining, emulating, or otherwise manifesting the traits of God.
They discussed that in Eden, Adam and Eve were not in communion with God – they hid, they did not respond to being called. And my father’s friend argued that the fruit was necessary so that humans could come to know the divine, that the Fall was the nudge out of the protected, simple, but eventually unsatisfying paradise of a coddled childhood that enables humanity as a whole to have an adult relationship with the divine, a relationship both fully mortal and fully divine, as exemplified by the life of Jesus. The Incarnation, as my father’s friend termed it, was a means of forging a gateway such that others could understand and reach a paradise that was more than Eden.
Sounds kinda like what a mafia boss does.
Whatever. I’ve got a very different view of the reasons for the success of conservative branches of all faiths, not just Christianity, but let’s argue that one in some other thread sometime.
The point of more traditional religion is that the truth is knowable to some degree, courtesy of God’s (or the gods’, in the case of polytheistic religions) willingness to reveal himself to mankind.
It’s hard to see how “the growing human awareness of a transcendent spirit” can be responsible for the tales of Abraham, of Joseph, of the Exodus, and the like. “Transcendent spirits” don’t usually get credited with getting their hands dirty with particulars. The Judaeo-Christian God does.
Diogenes, this sounds like you’re giving us your view of God. But is it compatible with Christianity, or is it something else entirely? (Just as an aside, I’m not sure what I have to gain through interaction with a God that’s just as messed-up as I am.)
An evolving awareness of God can’t produce new covenants or codes of living? Why not? I suppose if you think that God literally carved the commandments on a rock, and guided the Israelites as a pillar of light, etc. that’s one thing, but if these are metaphors, if a faith in a benevolent God was a “pillar” of light and guidance in the wilderness, if the new laws were inspired and informed by this new faith then you have a different story.
I don’t really have a view of God. I’m just trying to present a hypothetical alternative to theistic Christianity. My description of an ecstatic God-awareness hiding behind the ego is essentially Buddhism. I guess I’m proposing a Buddhist metaphysic as informed by a Christian ethic (as I think this is something close to what Spong is doing) Whether this is palatable to Christians is what I’m trying to find out.
To answer your aside, it’s only the egos that are messed up. The “Buddha nature” (Christ-consciousness) underneath the ego is perfect. When you strip away the ego you are in blissful communion with the perfection of the universe.
That was quite a post, Poly! Much there that I agree with, and a fair bit that I disagree with as well. I’m going to cut to the proverbial chase - the Crucifixion and Resurrection - just to make sure I comment on those two points at all.
I can’t say I like this, and oddly enough, I don’t think Spong would either! For totally different reasons, of course, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. 
I’ve got no personal stake in the atonement doctrine. But the Crucifixion has to do something essential, it seems to me, or we’ve been misrepresenting the heart of the Gospel message for the past two millenia. A Christianity in which the Crucifixion didn’t effect salvation, but rather was finally the sufficient press release that got the word out, where the Exodus and the Promised Land, the example of King David, and the messages - and deaths - of the prophets didn’t…well, I’ve got real trouble with that. If the point of the Crucifixion is to point to a salvation that already exists, I don’t think we can preach Christ crucified, because Christ crucified would have been preaching about something beyond that.
It also reminds me of the old joke about Jesus’ middle initial: the ‘H’ stands for ‘Hallmark’ because God cared to send the very best.
Now, why Spong wouldn’t like it: from the link Diogenes gave:
It seems to me that if God required that, not to fix the relationship, but to get the message out that it was already as fixed as it needed to be, that wouldn’t ease Spong’s hostility one whit.
Now to complete the triangle, Spong on Jesus’ death: “When this incredible life came violently and prematurely to an end…” (WCMCOD, p. 116) Spong would change the Crucifixion from the center of God’s plan to a meaningless killing of a remarkable man. 'Nuff said.
Now, on to the Resurrection:
I don’t totally discount the potential validity of this interpretation, Poly, but it’s the empty tomb that’s at the center of the Biblical resurrection stories. If Jesus’ spiritual body is not the resurrection and transformation of his physical body, then his physical body should still be in the tomb, just as our bodies will remain in the grave after we die, unaffected by our hoped-for resurrection into a new life. But there it is in all four Gospel stories: the empty tomb. Whatever the nature of Jesus’ resurrection, the Gospel accounts imply that his original body was in some way involved.
OK, enough seriousness for now:
Nuke a gay Arab for Christ! 
Congratulations, RT! You’ve just given Falwell et al. a new ralling cry.
And just in time for the war. 
I don’t post much in Great Debates, partly because by the time I get to a thread, most of the good points have already been made. However, at the risk of repeating what’s been said earlier, I thought I’d give my reactions (as a Christian, but not any particular kind of Christian) to those 12 assertions.
I don’t know what he means by “theism” here (or “God, but not a theistic God”), and if I don’t, I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of other people don’t either. So I don’t know what he’s denying here without further explanation. And why can God no longer be conceived in theistic terms?
This just sounds like the typical Extreme Liberal view (or Extreme Liberal reaction to the Extreme Conservative view) that something is either literally, historically, scientifically accurate, or else it’s nonsense.
FWIW, my own take on the Creation and Fall story is that there’s definitely something to it, some truth there, but I have yet to find an interpretation of it or way to approach it that completely satisfies me.
Modern science attempts to describe or explain what happens naturally. It can’t deny that miracles or supernatural events could have occurred except by assumption.
I’ll admit, some explanations of the cross strike me as either barbaric or just nonsensical, but that’s not the same thing as saying that something that Christians throughout the centuries have seen as so central is completely bogus.
Now here I just don’t follow the logic.
Um, couldn’t the Ascension be a metaphor (even an acted-out metaphor on Jesus’s part) rather than implying that Heaven is a phyical place you can get to just by going up far enough above the earth’s surface?
If I say, “The sun rose this morning,” would Spong tell me that I didn’t accept the concepts of a post-Copernican space age?
Bazillions of Christians (and Jesus himself, in the New Testament) would disagree.
Salvation by grace, not works, is hardly a new idea.
Now this I find neither controversial nor incompatible with traditional Christianity.
Bottom line: I guess what bothers me most about Spong is his arrogant leap from “I can’t believe X, Y, and Z” to “no rational person could possibly accept X, Y, and Z.”
I think it would be interesting if someone could e-mail a link to this thread to Bishop Spong and see if we could elicit a response. I’m sure he would be glad to see some grass roots response to his literary efforts.
But, Thudlow, if something is supernatural then it would be beyond the ken of modern science.
Grienspace: Are you sure about that? The good bishop might have a heart attack upon encountering the SDMB.
I was thinking more in terms of an evolving awareness of a nonpersonal God motivating Abraham to leave Ur behind, or refusing to let Moses off the hook (when the Israelites where afraid to take on Pharoah, and Moses wasn’t really eager to do so on their behalf).
I can see where an ongoing encounter with a nonpersonal God could lead to an Eightfold Path or Ten Commandments or whatnot, but it seems to me that such a God would not be the sort of force to send people down a particular path of action.
RT, to me it’s fairly clear that God didn’t change but that human awareness of who He was and what He wanted of us did. Not being Spong and not being able to invest a part of myself in a relationship with Being Itself or the Ultimate Ground of All Being, I grasp Him as being a Person (or Three Persons, to get technical ;)) – but I’m all too intensely aware that that too is only a partial understanding of a Being beyond our comprehension.
More than a Person, not less.
Poly, I agree with all that you just said, especially the “More than a Person” part. God being God, there’s far, far more to him than we can grasp. But for you and for me, Person-hood is unquestionably part of that.
My reading of Spong, however, is that God as a Person is one thing he’s eager to move away from. (See my first post on this page - I quote him about halfway down, just below the HHG joke, on this subject.)
RT, I think that Spong is just saying that it is naive to think of God only in personal terms. God is not the old man on the Sistene Chapel. When we encounter Biblical stories of god’s interaction with man, I think we can assume that any descriptive form or “personality” attributed to God in the Hebrew Bible is only for the convenience of translating the story into a more comprehensible form. God is not a “father” any more than he is a burning bush. The personal God is only an allegory. We can’t even contemplate, much less feel affection for a formless, unknowable God, so we must construct analogies (it is as though God were a loving father…) to better facilitate a relationship. I think that Spong is just saying that we shouldn’t mistake the metaphors for the substance. In other word, I don’t think he’s moving so much away from God as a “person” (inasmuch as it is a useful device for focusing devotion and contemplation) as he is disavowing God as a specific person or as a being which can be confined by a specific iconographical construct.
But Christians have been coming up with “new and improved versions” of Christianity for almost 2000 years. No reason I can see to stop now.
Consider: the doctrine of the Trinity was not settled on until some 300 years after Jesus’s death. How do we know that those who chose that interpretation chose the right interpretation? Spong is courageous enough to say that the “very foundations of belief” might have been wrong all that time.
Consider: The earliest Christian writers (Clement, Ignatius) don’t quote from any New Testament books. The next generation of writers quote from non-NT books, sometimes referring to them as “Scripture”. Question: how do you know that the “God of the Bible” is the same God that Jesus believed in? Sure, you can take this as an assumption. But you might be wrong!
Views like Spong’s and the many eloquent writers on this thread come from acknowledging that there is a historical aspect to Christianity (or any religion): ideas change about what the religion means. Martin Luther (favorite of many fundamentalist Christians) was one person who instituted such a change. I’m no expert on Luther, but I think it would be fair to say that he “took out” at least one of the “foundations of the faith” of his time: reliance on the Pope as the ultimate authority of the Church. Of course to some this made him a heretic. But to others he was a visionary leader.
Excellent points, FriendRob.