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Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Muzi Cindi, of the Republic of South Africa, writes:

I got to read your material after a spiritual experience I had in August 2007. A friend gave me your book Jesus for the Non-Religious. I've since read most of your books and read your weekly articles. I thank God for the impact you have had on my life. I was on the verge of abandoning the Christian faith completely when I came across your material. I have since read Lloyd Geering, Don Cupitt and others. I look forward with great anticipation to reading your new book. I would like to share my personal theology with you and hear your response. I believe we are living in heaven today; this is the heaven that 1st century Christians spoke about. If the Apostle Paul would wake up, he would definitely say we are in heaven. The heaven we speak about will be inhabi ted by future generations. Again, thanks for being all you were created to be in order for us to be all that we were created to be.

Dear Muzi,

I am pleased that you have found my work important in your own spiritual journey. I am sure that my friends Lloyd Geering and Don Cupitt would be also.

I am confused by your letter and am not sure what you mean by 'heaven' so let me translate it into words that I do understand. I believe that I am living now in the presence of God, a word I cannot define, but I believe I experience as the "Source of Life," the "Source of Love" and the "Ground of Being." In this presence, I sense that I am also capable of transcending the limits of time and able to experience timelessness or what Paul Tillich called The Eternal Now. As such I already share in the meaning of eternity. I am, however, still aware of the pain and privation that many contend with in their lives. I recognize that suffering is almost universal and that life by no standard is ever going to be fair. So I don't think I could say that I am living in heaven now. I prefer St. Paul's words that suggest that I now see "through a glass darkly", but someday I will see "face to face."

Write again and tell me what you think of this proposed amendment to your thinking.

-John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Anne Fox, via the Internet, writes:

I have recently read a lot of your work in my search for a Christianity that makes sense and doesn't involve blind faith ignoring the contradictions of the Bible. Although your books have helped me to finally have the courage to walk away from many of the "traditional" beliefs, without fearing retribution, I find myself searching for the meaning of our existence. I used to find comfort in believing that innocent people who had miserable lives would no longer suffer after death and go on to a new "chapter" in their spiritual existence in some form of life after death which was a positive experience, wherever and whatever that many be. Now I found myself struggling to find meaning in life when so many people suffer. I really want to believe there is something more to us that just the physical cells. What do you think happens to us when our bodies die?

Dear Anne,

You are wrestling not with some tangential idea, but with reality itself. I congratulate you on that and urge you not to give up your quest. You are just at the beginning of discovery.

Western religion has traditionally taught us to think of God as external to this world, but who is nonetheless the source of life's meaning. It was the assumption of this theological position that this God can and will invade this world to make things right. That is why the unfair world is so difficult for most people to understand and why we have traditionally invested our hope for fairness, not in this life, but in life after death.

Many things have shaken our confidence in these concepts. This God above the sky seemed far more real when we thought the earth was the center of a three tiered universe. The all-seeing God above the sky was then endowed with record-book-keeping efficiency so that the afterlife would be appropriately be used to reward or punish us based on our deeds and misdeeds. What does one do with these ideas in the light of Copernicus and Galileo and the field of astrophysics that has flowed from them, confronting us with a universe so vast that our minds boggle to embrace it? The universe seems to be empty of this kind of divine presence.

We once defined this God above the sky as a "being," maybe the "Supreme Being," who possessed supernatural power and we expected this God to intervene into history on our behalf to accomplish the divine will or to answer our sometimes very self-centered and immature prayers. The work of Isaac Newton challenged this supernatural world of miracles and magic and left it gasping for life.

We once defined human life as a special creation made in the image of God, endowed with an immortal soul and "just a little lower than the angels." Then came Charles Darwin who defined us instead as "just a little higher than the apes." We began to see ourselves not as fallen angels, but as highly developed animals linked by DNA to everything from the plankton of the sea, to the cabbages, to the chimpanzees. Suddenly we wondered if there was any meaning to life other than the biological processes of being born, maturing, mating, reproducing and dying.

So it is that faith wavers in the modern world and the external supernatural being we once thought of as God might just turn out to be little more than a stage in human development. Certainly the God who is the one who rewards and punishes is little more than the behavior controlling parental deity that immature children seek.

I urge you to turn your attention inward not outward, to go so deeply into your own humanity that you escape its limits and begin to experience that which is transcendent or the divine presence. That is the only doorway that in my experience enables me to contemplate life after death. At least that is the path I sought to develop in my recent book, Eternal Life: A New Vision.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

John Gamlin from Old Hall, East Bergholt, Colchester, UK, writes:

If we are now beyond theism then I suggest we are also beyond the word "God" — beyond it because:

of the baggage it carries.
to continue to use it is to be constantly misunderstood.
we will continue to drift back into the old language and old images.

So what new name?

Life?
Energy?
Love?

None will do, but we need to look somewhere for a new way to describe the bearer of eternity.

Dear John,

Thank you for your perceptive question, which has forced me to think about this issue in a new way to answer it — or at least to keep the conversation going. I need to make some distinctions or clarifications.

There is a difference between the experience of God and the explanation of the experience. Religion tends to assume they are the same. Theism is a human explanation of the experience of God; it is not God. The experience can be real or delusional. The explanation will never be eternal. No explanation ever is.
Personhood is the deepest experience of our lives as human beings and we cannot escape its boundaries. We describe everything in terms of that reality. That is why we think of God after the analogy of a person. We can also never get into the being of God, or of a fellow mammal, a reptile, a fish or an insect. We define each out of the reference of our own personhood. The same is true for every other creature. Xenophanes said it in the third century before the Common Era, "If horses had Gods, they would look like horses."
The concept of God has been evolving as long as there have been human beings. In animism, which appears to have been the earliest human religion, God was defined as multiple spirits in a spirit-filled world. These spirits caused everything to do the things that we human beings observed happening. The sun moved, the moon turned, the flowers bloomed and the trees bore fruit. Animism sought to help us relate to and win the favor of these animating spirits. When we human beings moved into agricultural communities, God was defined in terms of the processes of fertility. When we grew into tribes on our way toward nation states, God became a tribal deity. In the Gods of Olympus, animism and tribal deities were merged into a hierarchy of Gods ruled by the head (chief) of the Gods (Jupiter, Zeus) but with animistic functions still being defined by spirits (Neptune and Cupid, for example). Finally, we moved into a concept of God's oneness and God began to grow vaguer and more m ysterious.
During our history, definitions of God have been born, changed and died and that is the process that is going on today. Our knowledge is expanding and our definition of God will expand with it. The God who was thought to ride across the sky as the sun, changed as our knowledge of the sun grew.

So what do we do? Allow the name to evolve. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is identified with wind and breath, concepts that eventually evolved into the word Spirit. God was identified with love, as the expander of life, and evolved into the understanding of the Christ figure as "love incarnate." God is also identified with the idea of "rock" and evolved into the Ground of Being that we identify with the old patriarchal word Father.

I do not believe that in the last analysis any human being can actually define or redefine God, whether we call God the Holy, the Sense of Transcendence or anything else, but I do believe we can experience this presence and I do believe it is real. When we experience this presence I know of no other way to describe it except as "God." History teaches us that the word God is never static; it is always in flux and ever changing. I suggest that we not be frightened and allow that process to continue.

I will continue to think about it because of you. So I thank you for your question.

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Barbara Palmer, via the Internet, writes:

I am interested in your theology of love when speaking about God loving creation, humans loving God, and even loving the neighbor. Understanding that love transcends human emotion, how does love manifest in these areas? If God, as you say, is not a being, how does God love the world, the universe? If God is not an entity, what does it mean to love God? Doesn't one need an object to express love? And if one doesn't know or is interested in the neighbor, whoever that might be, how does one love the neighbor? We religious people throw words around so carelessly, therefore I would appreciate your being as specific as possible.

Dear Barbara,

I am not sure that the problem is that people throw around words so carelessly, but that the only words we humans have to use are human words, bound by time, space and human experience. Whatever God is, God is surely beyond the boundaries of human life. So the more specific we are about God, the less accurate we probably are. Let me repeat my favorite analogy. Horses cannot escape the boundaries of what it means to be a horse, nor can a horse view life from any other lens or perspective save that of a horse. Therefore a horse could never describe what it means to be human. In a similar manner, a human being cannot escape the boundaries or perspective of what it means to be human and therefore can never define or describe what it means to be God. I wonder why it is that we not only continue to try to do the impossible, but even continue to persecute those who disagree with our definition or description.

So what are our realistic possibilities? We can describe just how it is that we experience God. We can always describe a human experience since that is within the realm of our competence. We do need to face the fact, in the name of honesty and to escape the most destructive elements of religion, that some human experiences are delusional.

By the word God I mean that which calls me beyond the limits of humanity, that which empowers me to live to love and to be. When someone asked the author of the First Epistle of John to define God, he did so by saying that "God is love." I think that what he meant by that was that it is the unanimous human experience that love expands life. Love is not something any human being can create. We must receive love before we can give it. We cannot hoard love once we have received it. Love that is not shared always dies. So love is a power that appears to relate us to something beyond ourselves. Love is thus a power that enables us to journey beyond the boundaries of the human and to embrace that which is transcendent. Love always manifests itself in enhanced life. Perhaps we should stop talking about God loving us or our loving God, since that kind of language turns God into a being. The proper language would be to relate the experience of love to the experience of God. We would then recognize that the word "God" is a human construction that seeks to define the experience of transcendence, which calls us more deeply into what it means to be human.

If one has identified God with the love that enhances life then the way we love our neighbor, both known and unknown, is to act toward them in such a way as to enhance their humanity. Once we break this language barrier and begin to think through the dimensions of speaking not about God, but about our experience of God, then I believe we could reconstruct the Jesus story on this basis and be within the context of Jesus' purpose as St. John defines it, "That they may have life and have it abundantly."

Thank you for your question and for forcing me to put new words into this equation.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Ann Holtz from Knoxville, Tennessee, writes:

How does Panentheism differ from your vision of God beyond theism?

Dear Ann,

The two would be close, but I do not think that human beings should ever try to define God. Panentheism is one more human attempt at an explanation.

Panentheism suggests that God is experienced in and through all things, but tries to distinguish itself from the claims made by Pantheism that God is identical with all things. Panentheism was designed to assert "the beyond" nature of the transcendent.

My sense is that all human beings can do is to talk about how we believe we have experienced God, which is quite different from who or what God is. Horses cannot, because of the limits of their horse consciousness, describe what it means to be human. I wonder why any of us think that human beings, because of the limits of our human consciousness, can describe what it means to be God.

So I am not drawn to any words that purport to define God. I am deeply drawn to God but am content to experience that reality, not to define it. So Theism, Pantheism, Panentheism are of little value to me. Thanks for enquiring.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Mitzi Roberts, via the Internet, writes:

Thank you for your enlightenment. I find the more we try to define God, the more likely it is that we are on the wrong page. The more I read of your teachings, the more I know that we must not try to understand, but to accept that we will never understand on this plane. The Bible tells a beautiful story and I love my Episcopal upbringing, but I don't have to take everything in the Bible and prayer book as "gospel." At 76 years, it is so comforting.

Dear Mitzi,

What a delightful 76-year-old you are! Thank you for your letter. The only shame is that, in your "Episcopal upbringing," these things were not brought to your attention 76 years ago, for they were certainly known long before that.

God is bigger than any human understanding of God. No Bible, no creed, no doctrine and no dogma can finally define God. It is a tragedy that so many religious people do not recognize this simple fact.

The world outside religious circles has certainly been aware of this for years. Don't you recall the line from Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" about the Bible: "It ain't necessarily so." The Christian life is a journey into the mystery of God. The deeper we go into that journey, the more we realize that we have to go beyond the boundaries of all religious systems, including Christianity.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Bert Knapp from Granbury, Texas, writes:

I have just finished reading your latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision. I believe the thought you stated, but I have been afraid and almost ashamed to admit it. I am 81 years old and my journey of faith has involved many changes. I certainly enjoy reading your weekly columns and look forward each week to reading your latest series on "The Origins of the New Testament." After reading your book, however, I am curious about your position on prayer. I will appreciate receiving your thoughts.

A grateful reader.

Dear Bert,

Congratulations on reaching your 81st birthday. You are just a little ahead of me!

Thank you for your comments on my book and columns.

I think about prayer frequently. I write about it seldom. I can, however, refer you to two places. The first is in my first book, "Honest Prayer," originally published in 1973, but now back in print through St. Johan's Press in Haworth, New Jersey. It is a book that was inspired by conversations I had with a woman in the mountain town of Pearisburg, Virginia, named Cornelia Newton, who was in her early forties, married to a doctor and the mother of three young children. She was dying of an incurable malignancy. It is what I all "early Spong," that is, it represented my early attempts to make sense out of life's tragedies. I do not today disagree with anything I said there, but over the years I have moved beyond where I was when that book was written, not so much to a different place, but to a deeper place. In 2002, I dedicated two chapters to the subject of prayer in a book entitled, A New Christianity for a New World. That reflects much more my present understanding of prayer, but it is ever changing and ever growing.

To respond quickly, the way one thinks about prayer is determined almost 100% by how one understands the meaning of God. For most people, God is an external, supernatural presence, who can come to our aid, setting aside the laws of the universe to accomplish a divinely inspired purpose. It is that concept of God which, I believe, distorts human life again and again. That understanding presents us with a parent God who keeps us in the status of being perpetual, spiritual children. This is also an immoral God who has the power to influence events in the world and yet seldom uses it. This is a God who had the power to stop tragedy, but instead allows such things as the Holocaust, the Bubonic Plague, the devastation of hurricanes and Tsunamis and who even is said to use sickness to punish sinners. That definition of God results in a chaotic world run by a capricious, but not necessarily a loving, deity. I believe that this God has died in light of a new understanding o f the universe brought about by Galileo and by our understanding of how the universe operates developed for us by Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur and many others. That idea of God is little more than a wish fulfillment deity, a supernatural being who lives above the sky ready to spring into action whenever we ask this God to do so. Such a God definition is no longer viable or believable. I do not believe in a God who will plug the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in response to our prayers.

For many people, this recognition represents the end of religion. If the supernatural deity cannot come to our aid then why should we bother with religion at all? For me, however, this is nothing more than the recognition that we must find a new way to think about God and thus a new understanding of what it means to pray. To chart that new possibility is a major piece of why I wrote Eternal Life: A New Vision. It also requires a new Christology, which I sought to develop in my book, Jesus for the Non-Religious.

To say it briefly, prayer becomes something you are, not something you do. Your life and consciousness become the channel through which the meaning of God flows into human life. Prayer becomes the activity of opening your life to this deeper presence, this transcendent power we call God. Petition becomes the way you share life and love with others. Intercession becomes your willingness to be involved in causes of justice that help to build a world in which all people can live fully, love wastefully and be all they can be. Thanksgiving becomes the constant awareness of the way God changes lives. Meditation and contemplation become the means of spiritual growth and the development of a God consciousness and the praying person becomes deeply aware that God works through his or her life constantly. I think it is a beautiful vision. I am still living into it.

I hope this helps.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Shirley Krogstad from Hendersonville, North Carolina, writes:
If you had to name one "belief" of yours that has evolved or grown the most over the last ten years, what would it be?

Dear Shirley,

Since my whole belief system is deeply interrelated that is not an easy question to answer. I like the story told about an elderly bishop who remarked, "The older I get, the more deeply I believe but the less beliefs I have." That is exactly what I feel.

To answer your question more specifically, however, I believe it would be the way I think about God. God is no longer a person, a being or an entity to me. God is rather a presence in whom, to use words attributed to St. Paul, "I live and move and have my being." The "old man in the sky" was the first image to go, then the heavenly judge who kept record books and finally the father figure who desired praise and whose mercy I implored. The invasive, external heavenly deity faded and new images began to intrude themselves into my consciousness.

The interesting thing to me was that while these old images were fading, the God intensity within me remained steady and steadfast. Today I am a God-intoxicated person, but my definition of God is anything but crisp and well defined. I struggle to find words big enough to use when I try to talk about God. God to me is now more of an experience of transcendence, or perhaps the source of life, the source of love and the ground of all being. An experience to me is vastly different from a being who might be described externally. People hear these concepts sometimes as simply words. I hear them, however as a call to transcend all human limits and all human boundaries. God to me is a call to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that I can be.

A redefined Jesus still stands at the center of my God experience. He is not the one sent to be my savior, redeemer or rescuer. Jesus is not to God what Clark Kent is to Superman, a deity masquerading as a human being. He is rather a God presence through whom I am empowered to be open to the life, love and being that flows through me.

I now call myself a mystic because in my understanding of God I have gone beyond words into a kind of wordless wonder, awe and mystery. This is not where I was a decade ago. I doubt if it will be where I am a decade from now, but it is where I am today and it represents the evolving, growing frontier of where I was ten years ago.

Thanks for asking.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Sara Taylor from London, England, asks:

You say that all societies have or have had a word or concept meaning God. Is this true of Buddhism? I know that Buddhas have been deeply revered, but not that they were equated with God. So my question is, does Buddhism really necessitate a belief in or a word for God?

Dear Sara,

Your letter reflects an important understanding and also makes a common fallacy. The important understanding comes in the universal realization that all human beings postulate a realm beyond and greater than the realm of the human. That is what self-consciousness does to each one of us. The common fallacy is that there is only one human definition of that meaning.

Western religion has regularly and consistently defined God in theistic terms. That is, God is perceived as an external being, supernatural in power, who periodically invades the world in miraculous ways to establish the divine will or to answer our prayers. Eastern religion in general, but Buddhism in particular, does not define God in theistic terms. That has caused some westerners to refer to Buddhism as an "atheist" religion. Well, it is, but only in the sense that "atheist" means "not theist." It does not mean that there is no sense of God in Buddhism. Language is our problem. The theistic definition of God is so total in the western world that the word "atheism" has come to mean that there is no God. Theism is a human definition of God and, as such, is destined to die like all human definitions do in time. Theism is not God.

The second point of your question makes it clear that this common fallacy is operating. You are correct in that no claim is present in Buddhism that suggests that the Buddhas be equated with God. If God is not external to life as theism projects, then God cannot invade the world in human form. That is an idea that grew up in Christianity and, in my mind, still distorts the meaning of Jesus. The early Christian writings suggest that God — the Holy external other — designated Jesus to be "son of God." That designation took place at his resurrection for Paul, as he writes in his letter to the Romans about the year 58. It took place at his baptism for Mark, who writes his gospel in the early 70's. The literal identity between Jesus and God that brought about such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Trinity are the products of the next three hundred years, and are based on what I regard as a Greek misreading of the Fourth Gospel. The claim of divinity for Jesus, or the suggestion that he is the second person of the Trinity, is unique to later Christianity. The Jews never claimed a divine nature for Judaism's greatest heroes, Moses and Elijah; the Buddhists never made that claim for Buddha, and Islam never made that claim for Mohammed. That is not to say, however, that these religions do not have a profound sense of the holy for which the word God is the most popular human symbol.

I have moved theologically over the course of my life into a non-theistic understanding of God. That does not mean that God has become less real to me. Indeed the exact opposite is the case. When I speak about God I embrace the fact that I am only using words as symbols that describe not God, but my experience of God. I experience God as the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. I see the divinity of Jesus in the fullness of his humanity. I believe the way into God is to journey into, through and beyond the human. While the pathway might look different, the goal is quite the same.

Thank you for your question.

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Donna Percy, via the Internet, writes:

The idea of calling God "He" bothers me. Although I had a loving father, in my 28 years of teaching I have come in contact with many who were abusive. One year, a grandmother came in for a parent conference and revealed that her granddaughter's father, under the guise of saying goodnight prayers with his daughter, sexually abused her for years. I wonder how this girl will be able to receive God's message when she continually hears God referred to as "He"? Even the hymns are filled with references to "Him." Fortunately, our current pastors use "God" — not the pronoun — and few in the church have noticed. I write on behalf of all the girls of this world who, like my beloved student, have been hurt deeply by their fathers.

Dear Donna,

I share your concern but we have to overcome perhaps 10,000 years of training in the maleness of God. An enormous start on this consciousness raising activity has been achieved, but to erase the influence of the ages will literally take ages. Liturgies change, but ever so slowly, and most of them even now are rooted in the 13th century. The gospels reflect the patriarchal prejudice of the first century Jewish world in which they were created. Even the Ten Commandments assume that women are the property of men (thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his ox).

Polygamy is present in the Bible because women were defined as property hence the richer the man was, the more wives he could possess, as well as more sheep and cattle. My guess is that it will take another 100-200 years to remove the prejudice and stain of patriarchy from our patterns of worship. That is not said to be discouraging since that is very rapid in terms of how long sexism has been around. The fact remains that for those who are victimized by this prejudice, every day is one day too long.

This concern only dawned on me well into my adult life. I recall that when I wrote in 1973 and published in 1974 my second book, "This Hebrew Lord," I was unknowingly still completely insensitive to male-oriented, non-inclusive language. That was also no problem for my publisher, Harper Collins. Even their style sheet was not sensitive to the need for inclusive language. When HarperCollins asked me to revise this book for a new edition in 1986, both of us were in a new place. I made approximately 3500 changes in the text of this 180 page book, 90% of which were to remove sexist language, like the references to God that referred to God as "father, he, him or his." A wonderful early feminist woman in my congregation in Richmond, Virginia, named Holt Carlton, had begun very lovingly, but very persistently to raise my awareness to my closed-minded, unconscious, sexist prejudices. I was amazed that in the space of 12 years things about which I had no sensitivity at all had actually become offensive to me. All of us are caught up in this change whether we recognize it or not. The rate of change accelerates every year as the flow of information becomes almost instantaneous, but for sexism to be completely removed will still take three or four more generations. One reason for the slow pace is that both fundamentalist Protestant churches and Roman Catholic churches spend enormous energy opposing these changes. Those efforts will fail, but they do keep us from moving as rapidly as we might otherwise move. It is also one more sign of both the irrelevance and even the death of institutional religion, which always seems to be on the wrong side of history.

I do not urge you to be patient. I urge you, rather, to be loud in your complaints until the consciousness of all people becomes aware of the power of language.

God is not a father or a mother. Patriarchy has defined God for thousands of years, but patriarchy is now dying.

Thanks are due to people like you for being part of its death.

John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

David Stegall of Birmingham, Alabama, writes:

I can find countless numbers of biblical commentaries that hold a very conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical, literal and archaic world view. I cannot find one biblical commentary with a post-modern (or is it post-post now?), pluralistic, scholastically valid, metaphorically interpretive contemporary world view.

I have read most of your books, many of your essays; listened to your tapes (can I get more? Where?) And I have read most of Marcus Borg's books, some of John Hick's books and essays. All of you relate alternative (to literalist) and astute interpretations of biblical stories but where can I get a complete volume? I know they exist somewhere. An excellent example of this is your interpretation of the Book of Job.

Can you help me with this? I want to help create a new Christianity for a new world but I need a way to teach not only educated adults but also lesser educated adults and children. If we could start out teaching children in a loving and compassionate, rational way, we would not have to re-program them to a new cosmology, etc. when they grow up and start realizing that certain things they were taught in Sunday School and church do not make sense.

Dear David,

I get the sense that you are looking for a one-volume commentary on the Bible. If I have understood you correctly, they are mostly written by literalists because those who are not literalists would know how impossible that task is. The Bible is made up of 66 books, written over a period of about 1000 years, two to three thousand years ago. It is written by Middle Eastern people who have a Middle Eastern world view during the period of history from 1000 B.C.E. to 135 C.E. The books are written in Greek and Hebrew. There are many fine commentaries on individual books of the Bible. There are even entire Bible commentary volumes that literally line the shelves of many pastors, like the Interpreter's Bible, popular a generation ago or the Anchor Bible series put out by Doubleday a bit more recently. These volumes are, however, not uniform in content, with some authors better than others. Many of these volumes are in fact never opened. Few clergy want to spend much time on I and II Chronicles or the prophet Haggai, for example. It is far more fruitful to seek out a major writer who has dedicated his or her study life to a single book or group of books in the biblical text. I still regard Gerhard Von Rad's "Genesis" as the best commentary on that biblical book and on Old Testament theological issues. St. John's gospel has many great commentaries with the most recent one being Raymond Brown's two-volume work in the Anchor Bible series, which is still probably at the top of the list for understanding John. The work of C.H. Dodd and even William Temple on this Fourth Gospel, although two or three generations old, are still treasured by me. I rank Michael Donald Goulders' two-volume work on Luke as my favorite. It is entitled, "Luke: A New Paradigm."

Among the great names in biblical scholarship are David Friedrich Strauss, whose 1834 book, "The Life of Jesus Critically Reviewed," first brought biblical scholarship out of the academy and into the public. Rudolf Bultmann is probably the most quoted and defining New Testament scholar of the 20th century. Ernst Haencken's work on the Book of Acts has not, in my mind, been topped since its publication almost forty years ago. Outstanding Pauline scholars range from Martin Luther to John Dominic Crossan.

One way of separating the literalists from the scholars is to look at the publishing company. The big publishers, McGraw-Hill, Harper-Collins or Doubleday will not as a rule publish unlearned Protestant or Catholic propaganda masquerading as biblical commentaries, but small evangelical or Roman Catholic publishing houses do. Eerdman's, for example, is one publisher I generally dismiss without much further study.

Finally, if you want to read a book about the Bible as a whole, I recommend Marcus Borg's, "Reading the Bible again for the First Time" or my book, "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism." Both are introductory studies from a modern non-literal perspective.

I'm sorry I cannot give you a simple answer to your profound inquiry. It just really isn't that easy.

John Shelby Spong

Georgia Riggs from Grove, Oklahoma, writes:

When you spoke of forgiveness while lecturing recently in Oklahoma, my mind jumped to Desmond Tutu. I was honored to hear him speak in Tulsa. Since you have known him for so long, could you give us an insight into his spiritual journey?

Dear Georgia,

I met Desmond Tutu in the summer of 1976 about six weeks after I had been ordained as a bishop. I was in The Republic of South Africa, landing there just after the dreadful riots in Soweto, an apartheid community adjacent to white Johannesburg. Desmond, who was at that time serving as the Dean of St. Mary's Cathedral in Johannesburg, had became the voice of the people following those riots in which between 200-300 black teenagers had been killed by South African police in the dark days of apartheid. The police sent a flat bed truck into Soweto and hurled these deceased bodies unceremoniously onto that truck to haul them to the morgue. The picture of grieving parents at that morgue trying to find their own child in that pile of bodies haunts me to this day. Things were incredibly tense, with fear and hatred the dominant emotions that were finding expression.

The trigger that launched these riots was a requirement recently enacted by the white legislative body of the South African government that all public schools in the nation had to teach in the Afrikaans language, as well as in English and whatever was the local tribal dialect. Afrikaans was the language of those citizens of this land who were the descendents of the original Dutch settlers. They had formed the political majority, which had implemented the policy of apartheid. Afrikaans represented, thereby, the language of the oppressors of black Africans. This new law was thus seen as a final blow in the systemic grinding away of the humanity of the black students. Desmond Tutu who, when he became dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg had refused to live in the Deanery in white Johannesburg moving rather into black Soweto, suddenly emerged as the "Voice of Soweto." The media of the world dispatched their print, radio and television reporters to cover these riots and Desmond became the one who was destined to interpret for people everywhere the anger of the students and the depth of their anguish and complaints. It is correct to say that this requirement to add Afrikaans to the languages of public instruction was not the real cause of black anger, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back, ending the ability of these young South Africans to keep the pain of their oppression under control any longer. Riots always simmer within a people long before they break out into public acts. That is why it is never smart to treat the symptoms of people's despair, while ignoring the causes of that despair.

While in South Africa on this particular trip Desmond also took me, along with others, to meet various people and to see various places in Johannesburg. We talked a lot about Nelson Mandela, who was still in jail at that time. He introduced me to Winnie Mandela, who was then under house arrest. I attended a memorial service in the Anglican Cathedral for the murdered teenagers over which Desmond presided. I talked with grieving parents who had lost a child in this act of police brutality. I saw the irrationality of apartheid quite poignantly when Desmond and I went together to the post office one day to buy stamps and we had to stand in separate lines to make our purchase. My line said "whites only." His line said "blacks and coloreds only."

Later, I had the privilege of serving as Desmond's co-consecrator when he was made Bishop of Lesotho (pronounced Le-su-tu.) Later, in a public presentation I told him he would now be known as "Tutu of Le-su-tu, and that the only way I could possibly compete with that was to became "Spong of Hong Kong." That story has now been repeated hundreds of times.

While I was the bishop Desmond visited my diocese in northern New Jersey on a number of occasions before he became so deeply embroiled in the struggle to end apartheid that he had no time left for himself. We offered him a periodic respite of "R and R." Whenever possible his wife Leah would come with him. He assisted me by sharing in the confirmations in the Diocese of Newark. Today there are many Episcopalians in the Diocese of Newark who can say with great pride, "I was confirmed by Bishop Tutu." Finally in an effort to minimize his impact abroad, the South African government stripped him of his passport. I responded by going immediately in person to the South African Embassy in Washington to deliver in person my protest to their ambassador and my condemnation of this inhumane action.

Desmond's leadership and influence grew when he left his position as the Bishop of the Diocese of LeSotho to assume a national office by becoming the General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. After serving with great distinction there, he moved more and more to the stage of the world by becoming the Bishop of Johannesburg, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and finally the Archbishop of Capetown and the Primate of the Anglican Church in South Africa. He lived through and was a part of such historic events as the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, the fall of apartheid, Nelson Mandela's election as president in the first ballot in which Black Africans could participate and finally his own appointment by President Mandela to head the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of South Africa." That Commission did more than people will ever fully understand to bring this hurting country together again.

He is and always will be a hero to me. I regard him as one of the two or three greatest human being I have ever known. A picture of the two of us together is to this day hanging on the wall above my desk. I look at him and give thanks for him every day.

In addition to his wife Leah, I have also met two of their children, his son Trevor and his daughter Mpho. Just last month, at the consecration of Mark Beckwith as the new Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Newark, Mpho, now a priest of our church herself, came over to give me a much appreciated "Tutu hug and kiss."

Desmond is a profound person in his simplicity. He understands God as love and finds it quite compelling to live that out. He has loved his enemies into a new wholeness. Christianity is not so complicated when one goes to its core, as Desmond always seems to do. Christians are called to love others with the love with which God has loved each of us. We are to be the bearers of life, the enhancers of love, those who give others the courage to be all that they can be. How else do we serve the Christ or the God that this Jesus represented and revealed, whose purpose was stated quite accurately, I believe, by the author of the Fourth Gospel, when he has Jesus say: "I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly."

Across this world I have met many people who have no idea what it means to be an Anglican or an Episcopalian, but when I tell them: "I am a member of Bishop Desmond Tutu's church," they understand what that means.

Desmond's voice is not silent in the current disputes that rage in the Anglican Communion about the election of a female primate and the full and equal inclusion of homosexual people in the life of both church and society. He knows, like few people do, that the diminishment of one human being is the diminishment of all human beings. So he has been a steady and competent champion of the equality of women and issues a constant, courageous and graceful call for justice in regard to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian people into the life of the Church. He is a quite consistent Christian. I wish we had thousands like him.

I will return to South Africa this fall to do a series of lectures across that country. It will be my first trip there since the end of apartheid. My correspondence with South African friends has, however, filled me with great anticipation of the opportunity that I will have to see first hand, in that once oppressive country, the incredible transformation that has taken place since apartheid's collapse. I consider it a human miracle and I believe that Desmond played a major role in making that miracle possible.

I am privileged to know Desmond Tutu and to call him my friend. Thank you for asking your question, which has given me the opportunity to say these things publicly.

John Shelby Spong

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Joan

Do you believe in heaven and hell, the blissful heaven and the burning hell? And do you believe in Jesus Christ as your personal savior?

Answering your two questions is impossible until some terms are defined and some explanations are given. When you define heaven as "the blissful heaven" and hell as "the burning hell," you reveal an evangelical mindset that asserts a particular understanding that you are requesting that I either affirm or deny. It is to bind the discussion to your frame of reference. That immediately suggests that you do not want real answers, you want affirmation. I cannot give you that nor would I be interested in doing so. With that background, however, let me proceed to respond. I think it would be fair to say that I do not believe in a blissful heaven or a burning hell as evangelicals define those terms. I do believe in life after death and shall try to explain both why and in what way in my next book, which is scheduled for publication in September of 2009.

You define heaven and hell as places of reward and punishment where God evens out life here on Earth. I regard that as primitive, childlike thinking that transforms God into a parent figure who delights in rewarding goodness and punishing sinfulness. This portrays God as a supernatural, judging figure and it violates everything I believe about both God and human life.

If anyone pursues goodness in the hope of gaining rewards or avoiding punishment, that person has not escaped the basic self-centeredness of human life and it becomes obvious that such a person is motivated primarily by self-interest. The Christian life is ultimately revealed in the power to live for others, to give ourselves away. It is not motivated by bliss or torment. Both of those images are little more than human wish fulfillment.

The fiery pits of hell are not an essential part of the Christian story. If one would take Matthew's gospel and especially the book of Revelation out of the Bible, most of the references to hell as a fiery place of torment would disappear. That is a quite foreign theme to Paul, Mark, Luke and John. Evangelicals never study the Bible deeply enough to make this distinction. They basically talk about a book they do not understand.

When you ask about "believing in Jesus Christ as your personal savior" you are using stylized evangelical language. That language has no appeal at all for me. To assert the role of savior for Jesus implies a definition of human life as sinful, fallen and helpless. It assumes the ancient myth that proclaimed that we were created perfect only to fall into sin from which we need to be rescued. It was a popular definition before people understood about our evolutionary background. We have been evolving toward humanity for billions of years. Our problem is not that we have fallen from some pristine perfection into a sinful state from which we need to be saved, it is that we need to be empowered to become something that we have never been, namely fully human beings. So the idea that I need a savior to save me from a fall that never happened and to restore me to a status that I never possessed is in our time all but nonsensical. It is because we do not understand the nature of human life that we do not understand the Jesus role. I see in Jesus the power of love that empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and so I do not know how to translate your questions.

Sorry, but the old evangelical language that you use is badly dated and I believe quite distorting to my understanding of what Christianity is all about.

– John Shelby Spong

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Janet Schulte, member of the Department of Pathology at Ohio State University, writes:

I love the column — thank you for the insights. I am a science nerd — I taught and worked in the field of science all my life. I am also working on a degree in theology. I took my first biology classes about 46 years ago. When I learned about Darwin, I had an ah-ha moment. If the human species lives according to the model of the survival of the fittest, we will become extinct. That is part of the model that is often overlooked. Every organism must successfully fill a niche to survive. Only those organisms that learn the "law of cooperation" will ultimately win the day. That is what Jesus was trying to teach us. It is all about relationship — not domination.

Dear Janet,

Your ah-ha moment was indeed a profound insight. Every living thing, plant and animal is programmed to survive. What is true of all these living things is also true of human life. The only difference is that we human beings are self-conscious, while plants and animals are not. If survival is our highest goal, self-centeredness is inevitable and thus this quality becomes a constant part of the human experience. Traditionally, the church has called this "original sin" and has explained it with the myth of the fall. That was simply wrong. Survival is a quality found in life itself. There was no fall. Self-centered, survival driven, self-conscious creatures is simply who we are. There is thus no such thing as "original sin" from which we need to be rescued by a divine invader. So much of traditional Christianity assumes this false premise.

You are correct, however, in your assessment that survival, as the ultimate goal, will lead finally to extinction. Our hope does not lie in an external rescue. It lies in the process of evolution to carry us beyond the limits of humanity into a sense of being one with the universe. I don't think this happens by denying who we are or even being rescued from it. It comes from transcending who we are and I see that as the role of Christianity from which the church as an institution and most Christian individuals, have simply turned away.

We need to begin to see God and indeed the Christ life, not as that which rescues us from a fall and a sense of depravity (which basically creates in us guilt and a sense of worthlessness that we constantly transfer to the victims of our prejudice), but to see God and the Christ figure as the love that empowers us to grow into new dimensions of what it means to be human. It is a shift from guilt to grace; from the need to victimize to the ability to affirm the divine in all things. Individuality and the process of individuation are both necessary steps in the evolutionary process, but ultimately, as you suggest, they lead to extinction because they are based on competitiveness that leads to one sole remaining dominant survivor. Being one with nature and transcending self-consciousness in order to move into a universal consciousness is the future hope.

Your insights are, as the English say, "Spot on."

– John Shelby Spong

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JJJord 1726, via the Internet, writes:

The Church of England apologized to Charles Darwin last fall, nearly 150 years after he published his most famous work, for its initial rejection of his theories. The church conceded that it was over-defensive and over-emotional in dismissing Darwin's ideas, and it called "anti-evolutionary fervor" an "indictment" of the Church.

The bold move is certain to dismay sections of the church that believe in creationism and regard Darwin's views as directly opposed to traditional Christian teaching. The apology, which was written by the Rev. Dr. Malcolm Brown, the Church's director of mission and public affairs, says that Christians in their response to Darwin's theory of natural selection repeated the mistakes they made in doubting Galileo's astronomy in the 17th century. The statement read, "Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of "faith seeking understanding" and hope that makes some amends."

Opposition to evolutionary theories is still "a litmus test of faithfulness" for some Christian movements, the Church admits. It says that such attitudes owe much to a fear of perceived threats to Christianity.

Dear JJJord,

Thanks for your e-mail and the news that the Church of England has apologized to Charles Darwin for rejecting evolution. It is better late than never. My sense is that this action is more embarrassing than helpful. Darwin doesn't need the Church's apology. His thesis is now accepted academically across the world. Evolution is taught in fourth-grade science books. Medical science assumes its truth and the discovery of DNA took away the last vestige of the suggestion that it was still "an unproved theory." The fact that there are some benighted souls in the world who believe that quoting the book of Genesis can somehow counter the insights of Charles Darwin, or that it is their Christian duty to resist Darwin, is hardly determinative in the debate.

It is a tragedy that the Church officially resisted Darwin for the last 150 years, but that is quite typical of church leaders' behavior. Recall that it was in December of 1991 that the Vatican finally admitted that Galileo was correct. This was about 40 years after space travel had begun. If Galileo had not been correct, our spacecraft would have collided with the sky that separated heaven from earth.

I would suggest the leaders of the Church of England must now practice what that apology to Darwin suggests that we believe. For Darwin attacks the basic Christian myth of a perfect creation, the fall into sin, the divine rescue carried out by Jesus and the restoration through faith to our status as those created in the image of God. If we evolved from single cells into complex self-conscious creatures then there was no perfection from which to fall, no fall into sin, no need for a divine rescue and no capacity to be restored to something which we have never been. This means that the whole way of telling the Jesus story must be rethought, and this reformulation will threaten church leaders deeply. Clergy on Sunday mornings can no longer address "fallen sinners." The mantra that "Jesus died for my sins" will have to be retired. The traditional meaning of the Eucharist will have to be revised. We will have to recognize that we are now addressing not those who need to be rescued from a fall but those who have not yet achieved the status of being fully human. Jesus must then empower us to be fully human; he cannot rescue us from sin.

I'm glad to see the Church of England begin to enter the 20th century. I will be happier when they finally begin to enter the 21st century.

– John Shelby Spong

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Dr. Ray Schofield, from Waukesha, Wisconsin, writes:

I subscribe to your letters, and I have read most of your books and have found them helpful in my personal search for truth and in the search for my own identity as a Christian. I am 75 years old and retired from a busy practice of family medicine. I consider myself a second-commandment Christian.

On both counts, human suffering has been one of my primary concerns. Early on as a physician and caring human being, it seemed clear to me that, of all the causes of human tragedy and suffering, there was no greater cause than that of people having children they didn't want or couldn't take care of. Therefore, potentially we had no more effective weapon than family planning against it. So I became an advocate of family planning. In the mid 1960s, in Waukesha, Wisconsin, there was and still is a religious bias against birth control, and not just from Catholics. Vasectomies were not done openly in the state of Wisconsin, as they were considered both immoral and illegal, so I was referring my patients to a urologist in Rockford, Illinois. After determining that vasectomies were not illegal in the state of Wisconsin, and having failed to persuade my urologist colleagues to do them, against all advice and in the face of religious criticism I decided to do them myself. Over the next few years I did thousands of them, as many as ten between morning hospital rounds and noon. I carried a surgical kit and did them on the road. Within five years, the practice of vasectomies was accepted and widely practiced in the state of Wisconsin.

I continue to be an advocate of family planning. Based on polls taken by our local health department and my own experience, I believe the majority of people favor making contraception and sex education available to all women of childbearing age, including sexually active teenagers.

So my question is this: Why the deafening silence from our Christian churches — conservative, mainline and liberal — regarding this humanitarian issue? Why the absence of family planning from all organized religious outreach programs? I have interviewed pastors and elected officials and concluded that religious leaders fear being seen as condoning sexual promiscuity, and both elected and religious leaders fear being divisive. They both dodge the issue by touting education and economic development, already long accepted approaches to the problem of poverty. But come on, that's not the issue. It's easy to support popular charities. I've always liked this somewhat obscure quotation of Emerson's that might apply here. "Your goodness must have some edge to it."

You've never been afraid of controversy, so I'm interested in your take on this issue, particularly if you can think of ways to change the thinking of the broad Christian community in a way similar to the way it changed regarding the specific issue of vasectomies a half century ago.

Dear Dr. Schofield,

What a terrific letter and what a powerful witness your life has made. Thank you for that.

The question you raised is daunting and powerful. Before trying to address it may I say that you are obviously part of the Christian Church, a "second-commandment Christian" as you call yourself — so the Church spoke loudly and eloquently through you.

What you are asking about is why institutional Christianity has been so silent on things like family planning. There are at least two things that I think can be said, not to excuse, but to help us to understand.

First, institutional Christianity has always been tied up over and repressive to issues of human sexuality. This stemmed from its move into a dualistic Greek thinking world in the second century that identified flesh and bodies with sinfulness while extolling souls and spirits so pure and holy. In time denying the flesh or the desires of the body came to be identified with Christianity. Later the Church declared that the holy life was the sexless life and so virginity was the pathway to holiness and celibacy was the mark of the holy or priestly life. A wide variety of negative things flowed out of this, including the negativity toward family planning, negativity toward a married priesthood, negativity toward women who were defined as "temptresses" if they were not virgins and the sense that sex was somehow dirty or unclean. For years women had to go through a ceremonial cleansing after childbirth before they could return to the Church. During the Middle Ages, cathedral choirs were normally made up of men and boys because menstruating women in the choirs might pollute holy places with their unclean menses.

I think it is also fair to say that institutional Christianity's negativity toward homosexual people and even the outbreak of priestly abuse of young boys that has drained the resources of many part of the Roman Catholic Church in paying off lawsuits is one more illustration that unhealthy and sometimes violent expressions of sexuality always result from the repression of healthy sexuality.

Once these negative attitudes are present in institutional Christian life, any attempt to change the cultural attitude is defined as immoral. So nations and states have made it difficult to oppose laws that when they were enacted reflected that distortion of the dominant religious perspective.

Today, efforts to teach sex education in public school are opposed by an unholy alliance of traditional Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestant fundamentalists. The current administration in Washington, bowing to the pressure of its "religious right" supporters, had advocated the teaching of abstinence instead of sex education. It has been a colossal failure, as statistics reveal. It has been about as effective in curbing sexual activity as the "Just say No" campaign was in controlling drug use. This administration has also refused to fund international family planning clinics around the world for the same reason.

Perhaps your letter will give people new courage to act. I do see a new day dawning in America on these and many other issues.

–John Shelby Spong

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Jeannie from Chaska, Minnesota, writes:

How do we really know what Jesus said? They get so much wrong. Is it not a house of cards?

Dear Jeannie,

It is not easy to determine what Jesus actually said or did, but I believe it is more substantial than a house of cards. Probably the reason traditional Catholics and evangelical Protestant fundamentalists try to literalize the Bible is that they recognize how fragile their grasp on truth really is and, unable to be secure in that fragility, they make incredible claims for the literal words of scripture or for the teaching authority of the church. Literalism in any form is little more than pious hysteria.

The problems are that we have nothing in writing from the time Jesus lived. The earliest material in the New Testament would be Paul's Epistles, written 20-34 years after the crucifixion and by a man who did not know the human Jesus. Paul's conversion is dated some one to six years after the crucifixion. From Paul we learn that Jesus was crucified, that he introduced the Lord's Supper and that he was perceived as alive in some way following the crucifixion and little more.

The gospels are written between 70 at the earliest (Mark) and 100 at the latest (John). Yet all four gospels reveal the impact of this Jesus on a variety of people. The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar spent more than a decade going over everything that the four gospels record Jesus as ever having said. When they completed this study, they determined that no more than 16% of the sayings of Jesus are authentic to the man Jesus which, of course, means that some 84% of the sayings attributed to Jesus are not historically accurate. The Seminar did not find a single word attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (John) to be authentic. The Jesus of John's gospel speaks to the concerns of the Christian Church near the end of the first century, not the literal words of a man of history.

I think I can demonstrate that all four of the gospel writers knew they were not writing either history or biography. Each was interpreting Jesus in the context of their relationship with the Synagogue and their time in history, most especially following the Jewish-Roman War when in 70 CE the city of Jerusalem was levelled by the Roman invaders.

If we looked at the gospels as portraits of Jesus painted by the second or even third generation of Christians and not as photographs or tape recordings capturing his exact deeds and words, I think we would be closer to the truth..

I believe the gospels give us insight into the impact of a man of history and they open the doors for an exploration into the mystery and wonders of God. That is why I treasure them.

–John Shelby Spong

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Ray Strong from San Jose, California, writes:

How do you answer questions about Jesus Christ returning to earth in a second coming?

Dear Ray,

I don't!

One who would ask the question this way has already revealed the fact that he or she is locked into a 1st century dualistic literalism. The gospels portray Jesus as referring to his second coming, which would occur, those texts say, before that generation had passed away. Obviously that did not happen. Remember the gospels are written 40-70 years after the death of Jesus and may reflect the early church more than Jesus himself.

The second coming is the flip side of the story of the Ascension. Both concepts assume a three-tiered universe and God living above the sky. Those concepts died with Copernicus in the 16th century.

I am simply not concerned with things about which I can know nothing. Predicting the end of the world and awaiting the second coming are the parlour games of literalistic minds.

I think that what the resurrection of Jesus means is that the human entered into God. I think that what the Pentecost story means is that God entered the human. That is the only second coming I care about.

— John Shelby Spong

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John Compere from Baird, Texas, writes:
My wife and I recently retired and relocated from metropolitan to rural Texas. As independent thinking, mainstream Protestants, we have encountered a "theology" in some of the small fundamentalist churches with which we are not familiar. Jesus is believed to be God and is worshipped as God (i.e. not the son of God, or a person with the presence of God.) The Bible reference usually provided is "I and the Father are one" John 10:30. However, it is our understanding that the Greek "one" is neuter, meaning one in essence or nature, not one person or being. We would appreciate your comment on the origin of this "theology" and its scriptural basis, if any.

Dear John,

I am not surprised that you have found fundamentalism in rural Texas difficult to understand. One has to be raised in that tradition, as I was, to know what it means to the people involved. You do not engage this way of thinking by rational argument. The Fourth Gospel is the only place where Jesus claims the identity of God, but I am not sure that is a proper understanding of this gospel. That is, however, is the way the Fourth Gospel is traditionally understood. I have just finished working my way through Rudolf Bultmann's massive commentary on John's gospel. He sees Jesus as "the Revealer" of God who becomes so mystically at one with God that John's Jesus can say things like "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father." John's Jesus is portrayed as believing that God worked through him. Later interpreters interpreted that to be that Jesus was identical with God. Yet in this gospel Jesus is made to utter the "High Priestly" prayer of Chapter 17. That prayer was not addressed to himself, but to one he envisioned as being beyond himself. John's Gospel portrays Jesus as dying. Surely God is not subject to the limits of humanity, but Jesus is. So it is apparent to me that these texts should be read as God being revealed in and through Jesus, but not incarnationally as if Jesus is God masquerading as a human being.

Mark, the first gospel to be written, portrayed God coming into the human Jesus at his baptism. That is not dual nature, but a God-infused life. The earliest records of Easter in the Bible speak of God raising Jesus. The action was God's not Jesus' — again no single identification.

What is clear throughout the text is that people met God in Jesus and through Jesus and that is what the core of the word incarnation was designed to say.

I hope you will find a church in which you can participate without necessarily buying the theology. Don't argue with it, but live out your values and through love be an agent of change within that church. I'm sure there are others like you in Baird, each waiting for someone else to take the first step.

– John Shelby Spong

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Mary Heins of Indianapolis, Indiana, writes:

As I read your description of the conference held in Porthmadog ("Wales: Where Visions of a Christian Future Are Being Born," June 25, 2009), I wondered if any mention was made of prayer. Do post-Christians, agnostics or even atheists pray? Is there acknowledgement of a higher being, perhaps a creator, a mind or consciousness? Prayer seems like such an important part of your life as well as many traditional Christians. The God I pray to these days is Spirit, the Spirit within which we live, move and have our being. This Spirit permeates all created life; it births life but also allows death, which is the passageway to the pure Spirit. Spirit is not all powerful, but is rather a guide, a way leading us. Spirit does not control natural forces of wind and water, etc., but I do not know Spirit's relationship to these elements. Clearly, this "image" is of my own conjuring, drawing from various sources, but for the purpose of directing, focusing and attaching my spiritual longings to "Another." What or who is the object of my prayer, if any, for such as those you describe in the Wales conference?

Dear Mary,

As I try to recollect the Porthmadog, Wales, conference, I do not recall a focus on prayer, and yet the conference itself was held in the context of and surrounded by the liturgies of the Church, all of which had prayer as part of them.

I do not think that prayer is the place to begin when trying to reform Christianity for the future. Prayer, at least as it is traditionally understood, is a by product of a particular theological understanding of God. The God to whom most people address their prayers is a being, supernatural in power, located somewhere outside this world and thus invoked to enter this world in some miraculous way to establish the divine will or to answer our prayers. If that definition of God dies then that understanding of prayer will die with it. So this conference was on the primary issue of how do we conceptualize God, not on the secondary issue of how do we pray to the God we have already defined.

What you have done in your letter is to recognize that the old God definition is no longer operative for you and so you have sought another definition. You try to enfold prayer into this new definition. I think you are on the right path and I encourage you to walk even more deeply into it.

I think "theism," which is the traditional definition of God as a supernatural, external being, who comes to our aid, is dying. I think this definition of God is the casualty of an expanded world view, but I do not think God is dying, so I seek to go beyond "theism" but not beyond God. Once the theistic God is no longer in view, a redefinition of prayer is mandatory. I have worked on this for many years. My first book published in 1973 was entitled Honest Prayer. In my book A New Christianity for a New World I devoted two chapters to this subject. One of my colleagues, Gretta Vosper, who heads the Progressive Christian Network of Canada, is working now on that subject in a book as yet untitled, which will be published by Harper/Collins, Toronto, sometime in the next two years. I have every reason to believe that Gretta's book will move the debate forward significantly.

– John Shelby Spong

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Twila Compton from Charlotte, North Carolina, writes:

The question I have is about prayer. For so many years I have begun my prayers with "have mercy on me, O gracious God." Having been well taught to be guilty and unworthy, it is hard to come up with a positive prayer. At times I feel like my religious beliefs are like a bowl of scrambled eggs and I keep trying to unscramble them.

Dear Twila,

Yours is just another form of the question that emerges constantly among my readers and those who attend my lectures. Prayer focuses our theology as does nothing else. In your words, you were taught to begin your prayers with a plea for mercy. You were taught to be guilty and unworthy. That is the experience of many.

Look, however, at what these words commit you to believe. You are making an assumption that God is a powerful parent figure in the sky who elicits fear and guilt. You have defined yourself as one who has failed to satisfy what you perceive to be this God's requirements. Perhaps that is because you have been taught that God is a judge "unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden." Who among us would not feel guilty and afraid before an authority figure who knows us this well?

This God might be very useful if controlling behavior is religion's primary agenda. If, however, the purpose of Jesus as interpreted by the Fourth Gospel is correct that he came "that they might have life and have it abundantly," then a prayer based on an understanding of God that elicits primarily guilt and fear will never accomplish that goal.

It is not, therefore, a positive way to pray that you seek, but a whole new understanding of life and what the word "God" means in terms of that life. That then becomes something that cannot be addressed in a question and answer format. It also points to why people like you have increasing difficulty participating in the life of traditional religious institutions that are more into guilt rather than grace, fear rather than faith and judgment rather than Jesus. If prayer is the activity of your life through which God is experienced as life, love and being, then prayer is more about who you are than what you do.

The journey starts there — travel well.

– John Shelby Spong

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The Rev. Irving Letto from Nova Scotia, Canada, writes:

If, as you have suggested, there was no literal empty tomb and the miracle stories do not describe events that actually happened in history, what was there about Jesus that so deeply captivated the first disciples? Is there something about the Jesus of history to which I can point today that anchors one as a Christian to see Jesus as an icon of faith?

Dear Irving,

Since I think that we can document that both the empty tomb story and the miracle stories included in the gospels are later additions to the Jesus story, your question actually carries us into the Jesus experience. It was the Jesus experience that caused people to see him as victorious over death and as the messianic figure around which the miracle stories gathered.

I see the primary Jesus experience as being that of a boundary breaker. His humanity and his consciousness seem to me to be so whole and so expanded that he was able to escape the basic human drive of survival that binds so many of us who are less fully developed. Unlike us, he appeared to need no security barrier behind which to hide. He could thus step across the boundaries of tribe, prejudice, guilt and even religion into a new dimension of what it means to be human and this is what caused people to experience God present in him. His call to us is therefore not to be religious but to be human and to be whole.

That is what every gospel symbol, from his miraculous birth to his empty tomb, is seeking to convey, so we read them as doorways into the meaning of God.

– John Shelby Spong

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Jeff Jones, from Duval, Saskatchewan, Canada, writes:

I moved from being an atheist to a believer. I would never have been an atheist if I had paid more attention to the church I was raised in, the United Church of Canada. I saw Christianity negatively because of the bad example and message of the conservative churches. To be fair, though, my church should have presented its views better. When I investigated, I found that it was not just secularism applied compassionately, but there were theological roots to Liberal Christian beliefs contrary to what fundamentalists claim. I have since found that there are good and bad wings in the Lutheran, Catholic and Anglican churches. I wonder if it is fair to say that God does not ever intervene. I have heard of some things that defy logical explanation. On a modest point, my Dad almost died in February of 2005. Perhaps it was just the power of positive thinking, but after the United Church Hospital chaplain led a prayer, he improved and three weeks later I br ought him home. He has since passed away but he got 17 more months of life. I saw in your records that you wrote an essay, "Why I am not a Unitarian." I tried unsuccessfully to retrieve that essay. Could you repeat it please?

Dear Jeff ,

I share your enthusiasm for the United Church of Canada. It was born in the 1920's as a merger among Protestant bodies in Canada, but primarily between the English Methodists and the Scottish Presbyterians in the Canadian Prairies. Just the fact that these bodies had to be able to see more strength in the things that united them than weakness in the things that divided them created a consciousness within that church that in successive generations would help them to be open to other changing possibilities.

In the 1930's, they affirmed that their ministry was open to women long before any woman sought ordination. Canadian Anglicans did not do that until the 1980's. In 1988 the United Church of Canada declared that no one was to be precluded from their life or ministry because of sexual orientation. At that time, the Canadian Anglicans were putting a priest named James Ferry on trial in a medieval institution called Bishopscourt and found him guilty of "disobeying his bishop" and removed from him the license to officiate as an Anglican priest. His crime? He had confessed his homosexuality to his bishop because he was being blackmailed in his congregation. His bishop responded by outing him publicly and demanding that he leave his partner of some years. When James Ferry refused to obey this command of his bishop he was found "guilty of disobeying his bishop."

Under the leadership of a moderator named Bill Phipps, the United Church of Canada inaugurated theological discussions that moved parts of this church into a contemporary conversation with the modern world.

It was the United Church of Canada that decided to build an experimental church in a Toronto suburb that would lease space in a shopping mall for worship on Sunday and do everything else in the homes of its members. Its life would allow liturgical experimentation and was designed to pursue theological learning even when it challenged conventional Christian understanding. They wanted to meet the alienated former church members more than halfway.

It was the United Church of Canada that produced and nurtured the Rev. Gretta Vosper, pastor at a Toronto suburban church, who became one of Canada's most exciting and, yes, controversial Christian voices. She leads the Progressive Christian Movement in Canada and is the author of a recent Canadian bestseller, With or Without God, a book that seeks a new way of understanding Christianity in the 21st century. While conservatives called for her expulsion, both her congregation and the United Church of Canada have been very supportive.

It is the United Church of Canada that has poured resources into conference centers across that vast nation, from Tatamagouche in Nova Scotia to Naramata in British Columbia, with Five Oaks in Ontario and Prairie Christian Training Center in Fort Qu'ppelle in Saskatchewan.

It is a church that encourages growth, contemporary music, theological and cultural diversity, environmental concerns, Christian education and social activism. I am devoted to it and have been deeply enriched by it.

To your question of whether God intervenes and the anecdotal data that you offer in support of that idea: I am suspicious of most claims but I would never say that God was limited by my knowledge. The theological problem comes when those who support intervention have to explain why God did not intervene to end slavery, to stop the Holocaust, to divert a tsunami or a hurricane. It is not easy or accurate to be theologically simplistic.

– John Shelby Spong

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Stephen Argent of Sussex, United Kingdom, writes:

Thank you for the stimulation of your published works and weekly newsletter. My question concerns the pastoral care of those Christians who do not have the intellectual capacity or strength of character to tolerate the ambiguity of your message. Rightly or wrongly their "simple" faith sustains them and many would be fatally undermined should they be confronted by doubts concerning such issues as the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection. Is it right to leave their views unchallenged, or should gentle sensitivity necessitate a less direct approach? I am aware that I will appear patronizing in posing this question, but from your own pastoral experience how have you dealt with this matter?

Dear Stephen,

Your question is a frequent one, but in my opinion it reveals things under the surface that I believe need to be faced.

First, is your concern really for those whose "simple" faith is being disturbed by developing knowledge? Frequently I find this question asked by one who is himself disturbed, but projects it on to others.

Second, are you really suggesting that truth should be compromised for the sake of those who might not be able to understand? Does that not make religion a bit of an opiate for the people?

Third, if truth is to be compromised in the realm of the church for the sake of those who might not understand or for those you call simple believers, has not the church become totalitarian? Is that not an example of control by giving people security when they cannot deal with truth? Is such a formula followed in any other discipline of human knowledge? Is religion somehow virtuous when it does what would be deplored in any other human arena?

Fourth, the pursuit of truth in religion is never imposed on people by force. That is not the nature of liberal education. The only people who seem to me to impose specific religious answers on anyone are those evangelical Protestants or conservative Catholics who believe that they possess the unchanging truth of God.

Fifth, the task of the Christian is to love "the least of these" our brothers and sisters. Seeking to protect them from uncomfortable truth is not just patronizing as your letter suggests, it is both demeaning and dehumanizing.

Finally, one of my professors once said, "Any God who can be killed ought to be killed." To which I would add, any faith that can be undermined should be undermined. A God or a faith that needs you or me to prop it up has already died long ago. You do not need to defend a living God. Only dead gods seem to require that.

– John Shelby Spong

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JJJord 1726, via the Internet, writes:

The Church of England apologized to Charles Darwin last fall, nearly 150 years after he published his most famous work, for its initial rejection of his theories. The church conceded that it was over-defensive and over-emotional in dismissing Darwin's ideas, and it called "anti-evolutionary fervour" an "indictment" of the Church.

The bold move is certain to dismay sections of the church that believe in creationism and regard Darwin's views as directly opposed to traditional Christian teaching. The apology, which was written by the Rev. Dr. Malcolm Brown, the Church's director of mission and public affairs, says that Christians in their response to Darwin's theory of natural selection repeated the mistakes they made in doubting Galileo's astronomy in the 17th century. The statement read, "Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of "faith seeking understanding" and hope that makes some amends."

Opposition to evolutionary theories is still "a litmus test of faithfulness" for some Christian movements, the Church admits. It says that such attitudes owe much to a fear of perceived threats to Christianity.

Dear JJJord,

Thanks for your e-mail and the news that the Church of England has apologized to Charles Darwin for rejecting evolution. It is better late than never. My sense is that this action is more embarrassing than helpful. Darwin doesn't need the Church's apology. His thesis is now accepted academically across the world. Evolution is taught in fourth-grade science books. Medical science assumes its truth and the discovery of DNA took away the last vestige of the suggestion that it was still "an unproved theory." The fact that there are some benighted souls in the world who believe that quoting the book of Genesis can somehow counter the insights of Charles Darwin, or that it is their Christian duty to resist Darwin, is hardly determinative in the debate.

It is a tragedy that the Church officially resisted Darwin for the last 150 years, but that is quite typical of church leaders' behavior. Recall that it was in December of 1991 that the Vatican finally admitted that Galileo was correct. This was about 40 years after space travel had begun. If Galileo had not been correct, our spacecraft would have collided with the sky that separated heaven from earth.

I would suggest the leaders of the Church of England must now practice what that apology to Darwin suggests that we believe. For Darwin attacks the basic Christian myth of a perfect creation, the fall into sin, the divine rescue carried out by Jesus and the restoration through faith to our status as those created in the image of God. If we evolved from single cells into complex self-conscious creatures then there was no perfection from which to fall, no fall into sin, no need for a divine rescue and no capacity to be restored to something which we have never been. This means that the whole way of telling the Jesus story must be rethought, and this reformulation will threaten church leaders deeply. Clergy on Sunday mornings can no longer address "fallen sinners." The mantra that "Jesus died for my sins" will have to be retired. The traditional meaning of the Eucharist will have to be revised. We will have to recognize that we are now addressing not those who need to be rescued from a fall but those who have not yet achieved the status of being fully human. Jesus must then empower us to be fully human; he cannot rescue us from sin.

I'm glad to see the Church of England begin to enter the 20th century. I will be happier when they finally begin to enter the 21st century.

– John Shelby Spong

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Tom Weller of Panama City, Florida, writes:

In your recent response about Darwin (in which you suggested the atonement theology will no longer be an adequate way to interpret the Jesus story) you said, "The traditional meaning of the Eucharist will have to be revised." Looking at the Eucharistic prayers of various denominations, including the United Church of Christ, I find them all focused on sacrificial death and atonement, all including the "words of institution." Is there a Eucharistic prayer that is not so focused that you are aware of or that you like? Or, perhaps, have you drafted a proposal of your own that we could see?

Dear Tom,

I have run into many Eucharistic prayers that are almost a denial of sacrificial thinking; the Church is certainly moving in that direction. I have never tried to write one, since liturgy has never been my talent. I do believe that Darwin's thinking will finally force the Christian Church to alter the way it talks about God, Jesus, salvation and human life. When that insight finally dawns on the Christian consciousness, the result will be a reformation so total that it will put the Reformation of the 16th century into the category of an afternoon tea party.

We will have to recognize first that we cannot define God; we can only experience the sense of transcendence, wonder and awe. When we talk about God, we are not talking about an external being, we are talking about a human perception and, as such, God is ever changing. When we talk about human life, we are not talking about a fallen sinner, but about an incompletely evolved creature that cracked the boundary into self-consciousness and needs to be empowered to become whole, something more than a survival-oriented creature. When we talk about Jesus, we are not talking about an external savior who came to rescue us, but a life in whom and through whom transcendence has broken into history. Jesus does not save us from a fall that never happened or restore us to a status that we have never had. He empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and to enter higher and higher levels of consciousness where we finally discover that we live in God and God lives in us. The Euchar ist then becomes a celebration of who we are and a call to walk more deeply into the meaning of humanity.

It was my work trying to understand life after death that drew me in this direction. I think we are headed for the most exciting century in Christian history. I anticipate that most of what we call religion today will die in the next century. Rigor mortis has already set in. Out of that death, however, will come a new beginning. I am glad that I have lived to see the birth pangs. Hard labor is ahead but a new creation is being born and in that new creation God will be newly experienced and newly discovered — not as a Being who lives above the sky, but as the presence that is revealed in the heart of the human.

Take these thoughts to your next Eucharist.

– John Shelby Spong

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Desi,via the Internet, writes,

What is this about Jesus leaving the area entirely and going to India and all over the world (Aquarius Bible)? I keep hearing these stories about Jesus traveling all over the world and then he comes back to his home in Bethlehem or Galilee to do his ministry after his travels. Also, what are these stories about his childhood? Now that I am reading your book, I think the stories are false, and I have heard LOTs of stories. However, I would like to have your comments. The stories are always in the vein of miracles and other supernatural things that they say were attributed to him as a child. I don't think this is factual or history. May I have your comments? What about his being married to Mary Magdalene — the basis of The Da Vinci Code? Any credence in that?

Dear Desi,

My first bit of advice to you is to read the Bible itself, not things like the Aquarius Bible. There is nothing in the biblical tradition and no data anywhere else about Jesus traveling to India or any other place. That is out of the pure imagination of some human being. It makes good fiction. It is not good history.

Second, there is only one childhood story in the Bible. You will find it at the end of the second chapter of Luke. It has to do with a trip to Jerusalem with his parents when Jesus was twelve. It was a familiar form of a hero story in that it provides insight into the childhood of the hero that presages his or her extraordinary life in adulthood. The boy Jesus in this story amazes his elders with his knowledge, which the reader is led to suppose comes from a supernatural source within him. He also lays claim to a special relationship with God when he refers to the Temple as "my Father's house." There is, however, no history in this story either, even if it is in the Bible. Luke alone introduces this story (and that not until the late 9th or early 10th decade of the Christian era) and Luke alone mentions it. He bases it on an earlier Samuel story and uses it to serve his interpretive purposes. Luke did not regard it as history.

While I do not think it can be proved, I do think it is possible to build a case from clues in biblical sources themselves for the fact that Jesus and Magdalene were married. I sought to do that in my book Born of a Woman. At the very least I believe we can establish the fact that Magdalene was very close to Jesus and deeply involved in, indeed the primary woman of, the Jesus movement. It is nonetheless highly speculative. Dan Brown is thus not completely out of touch with history when he makes that a key element in his book The Da Vinci Code. The rest of The Da Vinci Code is pure fantasy — very well written and exciting fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. There is no story of Jesus ever living in Bethlehem except in Matthew's birth story. Matthew then has to develop a story to get him to move to Nazareth, where all of the other gospel writers assume he lived. Even Luke asserts that he lived in Nazareth but was forced by an edict from the emperor to go to Bethlehem so that messiah could be born in David's city and thus lay claim to be the heir to David's throne. Yet all of the gospels refer to him as "Jesus of Nazareth."

Read the Bible itself if you want to know the early Christian tradition is. You will not find it in the Aquarius Bible. Read Dan Brown for good fiction. He is a terrific storyteller. But don't read either for biblical facts or for history.

– John Shelby Spong

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Charles Brittain from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, writes:

I am a progressive Christian, one who follows your scholarship and that of my pastor. In fact, you have visited our church and I have heard you speak in person. It was a wonderful experience for me. The problem I'm having at this present holiday season is that the scholarship and the traditional Christmas music and the visuals are not in agreement with each other. I feel that I abandon my intellectual knowledge when I participate in the traditional forms of Christmas liturgy and imagery. Can you suggest how that I may enjoy both the scholarship and the traditions of Christmas without feeling conflicted?

Dear Charles,

Thank you for your question, which is perfect for the column that goes out on Christmas Eve. There is no doubt that most people have literalized the images that Matthew and Luke have in their birth stories of Jesus (See Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2), but I do believe it is quite clear that neither Matthew nor Luke thought of them as literal events. The great majority of biblical scholars share that perspective.

The facts are that stars do not travel across the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with them; angels do not break through the midnight sky to sing to hillside shepherds; and human beings do not follow stars to pay homage to a newborn king of a foreign nation, especially when the same gospel that tells us this story also tells us that Jesus was the son of a carpenter. To continue this train of thought, no real head of state, including King Herod, would deputize eastern Magi that he had never seen before to be his CIA to bring him a report of this threat to his throne. That is the stuff of fairy tales.

A star does not lead magi down a wagon track of a road six miles from Jerusalem and then bathe the house in which the baby lies with heavenly light to show these Magi where the child they seek is to be found. Wise men do not bring gifts that symbolize kingship (gold), divinity (frankincense) and suffering (myrrh) that will mark the life of this infant. No one is that prescient.

Virgins do not conceive except in mythology, of which there were many examples in the Mediterranean world. Kings do not order people to return to their ancestral home for enrolling for taxation. There were 1000 years between David and Joseph, or some 50 generations. David had multiple wives and concubines. In 50 generations, the descendants of David would number in the billions. If they had all returned to Bethlehem, there would be no wonder that there was no room at the inn!

A man does not take his wife, who is "great with child," on a 94-mile donkey ride from Nazareth to Bethlehem so that the expected messiah can be born in David's city. One lay Roman Catholic woman theologian said of that account, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written that story!" No king slaughters all the boy babies in a town trying to get rid of a pretender to his throne, especially if everyone in that town would have known exactly which house it was over which the star had stopped and into which the Magi had entered. The whereabouts of the "pretender" to Herod's throne would not have been hard to identify if this were a literal story that really happened.

Certainly, both Matthew and Luke were aware that they were using these stories to try to interpret the power of God experienced in the adult life of Jesus of Nazareth. Matthew drew his wise men story out of Isaiah 60, where kings were said to come on camels "to the brightness of God's rising." They came bringing gifts of gold and frankincense. Matthew expanded this story with details drawn from other biblical narratives like the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon and the truckload of spices (myrrh) that she brought with her (see I Kings 10) and the story of Balaam and Balak from Numbers 22-24 in which a star in the East plays a prominent role. Traditional Jewish writings also used a star in the sky to announce the births of its great heroes, Abraham, Isaac and Moses.

Matthew wrapped his interpretation around the well-known story of Moses. That is why he repeated the story of Pharaoh killing the boy babies in Egypt at the time of Moses' birth, transforming it to be a story of Herod killing the boy babies in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth.

What these narratives were designed by the gospel writers to proclaim are:

Human life could not have produced the presence of God that people believed they had met in Jesus.
The importance of his birth was symbolized by having it announced with heavenly signs, a star in Matthew and angels in Luke.
In the life of Jesus, they believed that heaven and earth had come together and that divinity and humanity had merged.
Messiah for the Jews had many facets. Messiah had to be both a new Moses and the heir to the throne of David. The Moses claim was in the story of how Jesus was taken by Joseph down to Egypt so that God could call him as God had called Moses out of Egypt. The heir to David was the reason his birth was located in David's place of birth (Bethlehem) instead of in Nazareth, where Jesus was in all probability born.
This Jesus draws the whole world to himself, even the Gentile world of the Magi as well as the humble lives of the shepherds.

These are the interpretive details of the Christian myths. All of them came into the Christian faith only in the 9th decade. None of them is original to the memory of Jesus. Neither Paul nor Mark had ever heard of them. John, the last gospel to be written, must have known of these birth traditions, but he doesn't include them and, on two occasions, calls Jesus the son of Joseph (see John Chapters 1 and 6).

Given these pieces of data, there is no way the authors of the Christmas stories in the Bible thought they were writing literal history. They were interpreting the meaning they found in Jesus. As long as we understand that, I see no reason why we can't sing, "While shepherds watched their flocks by night" or "O, little town of Bethlehem" even if there were no shepherds who attended Jesus' birth and the probability is that he was born in Nazareth, which is what the first gospel Mark assumes.

As far as I know, adults don't believe there is a literal North Pole inhabited by a jolly elf named Santa Claus, who harnesses his toy-laden sled to his reindeer in order to bring gifts to all of the children of the world on Christmas Eve. Yet we still sing, "Rudolf, the red-nosed reindeer" and "Santa Claus is coming to town" without twisting our minds into intellectual pretzels.

My suggestion is that you separate fantasy from history and then enter into and enjoy the fantasy of the season. Dream of Peace on Earth and good will among men and women, and then dedicate yourself to bringing that vision into being. In that way you will understand the intentions of the gospel writers.

Thanks for writing. Enjoy the holidays, and Merry Christmas.

– John Shelby Spong

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Elmo Hoffman,via the Internet, writes:

I have read much of your work and met you once at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, at a pastor's conference. It was the same venue where I also met Marcus Borg. I am a retired civil trial lawyer and a late-life seminary graduate, now an ordained Disciples of Christ minister, although before seminary I was a lifelong Presbyterian (USA) from the same time frame and section of North Carolina as you. My question, which gives me a great deal of trouble, is: What is your basic understanding of petitionary prayer? I believe you have said, "A God who would save the life of one prayed-for cancer-stricken child and not another would be a monster." This makes sense but gives me a great deal of trouble in considering petitionary prayer. (I have read Honest Prayer â€“ I find no answer to this problem there).

Dear Elmo,

Thank you for your comments and for your question. Your question on petitionary prayer is almost always the first question that comes up wherever I go to lecture. People can talk about their understanding of God until the cows come home, but nothing really changes until they translate their understanding of God into their prayers. More than anything else, our prayers define our understanding of God. So to talk about prayer, we have to define who the God is to whom we pray. To say it differently, "Who do we think is listening?"

Most people, quite unconsciously, approach the subject of prayer with a very traditional concept of God quite operative in their minds. This God is a personal being, endowed with supernatural power, who lives somewhere outside this world, usually conceptualized as "above the sky." While that definition has had a long history among human beings, it is a definition of God that has been rendered meaningless by the advance of human knowledge. This means that for most of us the activity of prayer does not take seriously the fact that we live in a vast universe, and that we have not yet come to grips with the fact that there is no supernatural, parental deity above the sky, keeping the divine record books on human behavior up to date and ready at any moment to intervene in human history to answer prayers. When we do embrace this fact then prayer, as normally understood, becomes an increasingly impossible idea and inevitably a declining practice. To get people to embrace this po int clearly, I have suggested that the popular prayers of most people is little more than adult letters written to a Santa Claus God.

There are then two choices. One says that the God in whom I always believed is no more, so I will become an atheist. People make this decision daily. It is an easy way out.

The other says that the way I have always thought of God has become inoperative, so there must be something wrong with my definition. This stance serves to plunge us deeply into a new way of thinking about God, and that is when prayer itself begins to be redefined. Can God, for example, be conceived of not as supernatural person, but as a force present in me and flowing through me? Then perhaps prayer can be transformed into meditation and petitionary prayer becomes a call to action. The spiritual life is then transformed from the activity of a child seeking the approval of a supernatural being to being a simultaneous journey into self-discovery and into the mystery of God. It also feeds my sense of growing into oneness with the source of all life and love and with what my mentor, Paul Tillich, called the Ground of All Being. It would take a book to fill in the blank places in this quick analysis, but these are the things that today feed my ever deepening discovery of the meaning of prayer.

– John Shelby Spong

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The Rev. Dore' Patlian from Sarasota, Florida, writes:

I have long been an ardent admirer of your wonderful work to return Christianity to the root values of love, empowerment and healing of the body, mind and spirit. Anger and condemnation have no place in any church or group calling itself Christian. My question is, do you feel Paul and John, in particular, are responsible for much of the twisted doctrines of male domination, exclusion and hatred that are found particularly in Evangelical Protestantism? They did, as you point out, write nearly 80 percent of the New Testament, and Paul virtually invented Christianity as a religion.

Dear Dore',

I think you have collapsed a number of things into your final paragraph. Paul and John reflected the male chauvinist attitudes that were prevalent the world over at that time. As a matter of fact, I think the case could be made that Jesus was a radical feminist in the context of the first-century world. He clearly had female disciples who, according to Mark, Matthew and Luke "followed" him all the way from Galilee. John suggests that he violated religious custom by speaking to the Samaritan woman by the well. The other gospels tell of Jesus allowing the touch of the woman with a chronic menstrual flow. Jesus stood against the law when he supported the woman caught in the act of adultery. Even John portrays Magdalene as the first witness to the resurrection, which was clearly the early church's standard for apostleship. That being said, there is no doubt that in the early church dispute between those who came to be called the "Orthodox Party" and those who were called the Gnostics that the prejudice against women rose significantly when "Orthodoxy" won and when the Gnostics were defeated.

In some ways the Reformation of the 16th century was a reassertion of some Gnostic principles, and in the radical new Christianity being born today, other Gnostic understandings are being reasserted.

If we literalize the scriptures, as Christians have tended to do and which fundamentalists do without apology or hesitancy, we also literalize the prejudices of that era, which were against democracy, against people of color, against women and against homosexual persons. If on the other hand, we see the Bible as one stage of our development that is ongoing as we walk deeper and deeper into the mystery of God, we greet our emancipation from each of these prejudices with a sense of relief and joy.

That journey into the mystery of God captures the deepest essence of both Paul and John. Paul asks us to seek the full stature of Christ Jesus that is within us, and John has Jesus define his purpose as giving us life abundantly. Neither of these goals is possible if we are hardened by debilitating prejudices that violate the dignity of any child of God.

I always enjoy letters from you.

My best,
John Shelby Spong

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Mark Dickinson from Ottawa, Ontario, writes:

I have just finished reading Eternal Life: A New Vision. Thank you for writing this wonderful book, and thank you for sharing your vision of life eternal fulfilled. I embrace your vision with enthusiasm and I share in your celebration of our spiritual life.

In the early chapters of the book, you spend some time describing your journey, as a child and as a youth, within the boundaries and constraints and limitations of a conservative Protestant tradition. I can identify with many of your memories, and I can recall (20 years ago or so) sharing many of the "fundamentalist" beliefs and ideologies with young Sunday School students that I taught for 10 years within a Lutheran church outside of Ottawa. The stories of Genesis and Exodus and the narratives of the gospels rolled easily into the empty, hungry minds of the children and, in the spirit of most stories (and especially folklore), left these children excited and intrigued. But now, looking both backwards to where I started and from what I see today, communication or rather education of our young people becomes a little more complex and challenging.

If many (or rather, most) adults have difficulty jettisoning the literal interpretations of the Bible, how do we pursue the important task of presenting allegorical, symbolic stories abut the history of God's journey with humanity in a format and language that our young children can absorb and understand? Consider the following analogy: If we don't learn how to ride a bike before we can balance ourselves on two legs (and hopefully walk a few meters), should we not then continue to educate our very young with the images and stories that capture their imaginations and speak to their intellect (at that age)? Possibly, the problem with our Christian education process is that we never leave "the uncomplicated pictures" that we experience in the early grades of learning and that rather than maturing and growing in our divine-human journey, we remain closed in an understanding that we should have outgrown a long time ago. In other words, is the problem equally as much how we te ach, (i.e. training adults not to remain in a child's thinking) as what we teach?

Dear Mark,

I think you are correct. I might expand your thinking to include not just that we remain in childlike thinking, but we literalize the stories so that if the child rejects them, the child is made to feel that he or she has done something wrong or that either God or his and her parents will be disappointed. We do not do that with secular myths and stories. We do not teach our children that there really was a Little Red Riding Hood or a Humpty Dumpy who fell off a wall. The stories capture genuine human experiences. In Little Red Riding Hood the story is about young girls entering puberty being urged to stay on the "straight and narrow" path lest they be caught by a wolf and eaten up. The story of Humpty Dumpty points to and illustrates the fact that in life there are some things that once done are irrevocable.

Religion, because it seeks to provide human security, always seems to have a need for certainty and to literalize a supposedly inerrant source, serves that purpose.

Another factor is that so many adults have never moved beyond their childhood religious fantasies, so that they do not know how to cope with hard human realities; hence they seek comfort in the simplicity of yesterday in the protective arms of a heavenly parent.

As a church pastor, I believe the first step in assisting growth into maturity is to open the adults to new possibilities and hope that this knowledge will trickle down to the children. I do not believe in trickle-down economics; that usually is limited to the possibility that the wealth of John D. Rockefeller will trickle down to Nelson Rockefeller and not much further. I do, however, believe in the possibility that good ideas and even good theology will trickle down to a new generation. There is ample evidence that bad ideas and bad theology have done so.

Thanks for writing.

– John Shelby Spong

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Donna Kaplan asks:
I have a question about the scripture passage from St. John's Gospel that you quoted recently in one of your columns: "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father but by me (meaning Jesus)." What about the Jews?

Dear Donna,

There are several levels on which an answer to your question must be contemplated:

Did Jesus actually say these words? I doubt it. They appear in the Fourth Gospel, which was written 65-70 years after the death of Jesus. They are also part of a series of "I Am" sayings, which appear nowhere except in John and are regarded by most biblical scholars today as the words of the Christian community that have been placed onto the lips of Jesus. They are clearly not the words of the Jesus of history. The scholars in the Jesus Seminar regard nothing in the Fourth Gospel, not a single one of the sayings attributed to Jesus in that gospel, to be the authentic words of the Jesus of history.
Most of the Christians at the time that John's gospel was written were still Jews. The Jews who were the followers of Jesus had just been expelled from the Synagogue. The tensions between Revisionist Jews, who were also disciples of Jesus, and the Orthodox Jews who controlled the Temple are in the background of this gospel.
These words were certainly not meant to fuel an imperialistic missionary campaign to convert Jews and others as they were interpreted by later generations of Christians. The actual split between the Jews who were disciples of Jesus and the Orthodox Party of traditional Jews did not occur until almost 60 years after the crucifixion. That is, for the first 60 years of Christian history, Christianity was itself a Jewish movement within in the synagogue.
At this moment, I am reading Rudolf Bultmann's The Gospel of John: A Commentary. He argues, persuasively I believe, that John portrays Jesus as the logos enfleshed in human life, calling us all to a deeper sense of what it means to be whole and human. To come to the God present in Jesus for John was to discover the logos in each of us. That, argues Bultmann, is what Jesus represented to the people of his day. It was that discovery, not some form of doctrinal Christian belief or faith, that was for John the only doorway into the ultimate reality we call God. That is quite different from saying that only those that believe in what Christianity says about Jesus will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Recall that in Matthew's parable of the judgment (Mt. chapter 25), Jesus says the criterion for eternal life is not what you believe but how you respond to the presence of God in another human being, especially those regarded as the least of our brothers and sisters. In that parable neither the sheep nor the goats are ever asked what creed they say. They are asked "did you see and respond to the presence of God in another human being." It was the Epistle of John that states that if you cannot love your neighbor whom you have seen, how can you expect to love God whom you have not seen?

Those who quote John's gospel to validate their own exclusive religious prejudices simply have no idea what John's Gospel is about. This Gospel does not lend itself to proof texting. It is far too profound a work for that.

– John Shelby Spong

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Karen Hutton from Pleasantville, California, writes:

Is there any purpose in staying a member of a traditional Christian Church if you no longer believe the things the church regards as its core beliefs? Why have you stayed with your church, given your criticisms of many of the basic aspects of Christianity?

Dear Karen,

Before answering that question, we need to identify what it is you are calling "core beliefs" or the "basic aspects of Christianity." I believe that what most people call orthodoxy in religious beliefs is little more than the imposed authority of some part of the Christian faith. The claim to be orthodox in one's belief is not to acknowledge a point of view that is true, but only the point of view that has prevailed. My studies lead me to believe that there never was a single consistent set of Christian beliefs. There were many Christianities from the dawn of Christianity itself. Various groups have tried to define true Christianity, but when they do they almost always define their own institutional, authoritarian system.

Some people, for example, assert that the historic creeds defined primitive Christianity. The Apostles' Creed, however, began as a series of baptismal formulas in local churches in the third century and these formulas differed widely until they evolved into a single form somewhere between 250 and 290 CE. I doubt if the actual apostles would have recognized much of it.

The Nicene Creed, adopted at the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, was designed primarily to close the loopholes in the Apostles' Creed. The Athanasian Creed, a product of the late fourth century, was designed to close loopholes in the Nicene Creed. The earliest creed of the Church was only three words, Jesus is Messiah. The word "messiah" meant a variety of things to the Jews, so even the three-word creed had wide flexibility.

Others assert that believing in the Virgin Birth is a "core doctrine" of Christianity, but scholars can now demonstrate quite conclusively that both Paul and Mark seem never to have heard of it; and John, who was among the last writers in the New Testament, appears to have specifically rejected it since he refers to Jesus on two occasions as the "son of Joseph."

Still others suggest that the physical resurrection of Jesus is the essential core belief of Christianity, but I think I can demonstrate that Paul did not believe the resurrection was physical, and neither did Mark. Matthew is ambivalent. It is Luke and John, the last two gospels to be written, that interpret the resurrection as a physical resuscitation of a deceased body. So determining what the "core beliefs" of Christianity are is not as easy as people seem to think.

Some, usually in evangelical or in the conservative Catholic traditions, argue that doctrines like the Incarnation, the Atonement and the Trinity set the boundaries around essential Christianity, but once again these doctrines were not fully developed until the third and fourth centuries and it would be difficult to demonstrate that either Paul or Mark were Trinitarians.

My point is that Christianity has always been a movement and that most churches have simply frozen Christianity at fairly primitive levels. It is not to oppose basic Christianity that is the agenda of Christian scholars; it is to seek truth through the Christian story or through the Christian lens. That is what keeps me active in church life. Christianity is not static or doctrinal. It is a pathway we walk into the mystery of God. I grant that it is easier to walk the Christ path in some churches than in others, but true Christianity is always evolving into what it can be; its purpose is not to protect what it has been. So I would suggest that for you to see your role in your church to be that of a change agent, you are in fact being a true worshiper of Christ.

I hope this helps. I think institutional Christianity needs people like you and me in it.

– John Shelby Spong

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Evelyn Evans, via the Internet, writes:

I am an Anglican, but having accepted the concept of a non-theistic God, I feel uncomfortable attending church with all its outdated forms of worship. To leave the church, however, is to lose my "church family" and the human contact, as well as my part in the church's ministries, all essential to the expression of God's love. What shall I do?

Dear Evelyn,

I share your concern. I have in the course of my career attended churches with grand musicians and able choirs that use, without any obvious sense of being disconnected, a formal if slightly medieval liturgy. Frequently, its ordained leadership is all male and its leaders give no sense of being aware of the theological revolution raging in the Christian world, inaugurated early in the 19th century by such people as Hegel and Alfred North Whitehead. The liturgy followed on many Sundays reflects little more than a world that no longer exists. That liturgy still talks of God as "a being" who is external, presumably who lives above the sky, who desires to be flattered with our words of praise and who stands ready to judge.

These churches also seem unaware of the revolution in critical biblical studies that broke upon the Christian world almost 200 years ago. For example, their lay readers will frequently talk about the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians or to Timothy, neither of which Paul wrote. In sermons many clergy make the unconscious assumption that the gospels are history, that the wise men really followed the star and that Jesus really said all of the things attributed to him in the gospel. Adult education is almost non-existent in so many churches and where it is present it is mostly ineffective because the necessary time is never allotted, since liturgy (which is always the clergy favorite) not education is the priority. The only time real change can come to such churches is when there is a change in clergy leadership. Even then, real educational engagement is resisted since church has become for most people anything but a place to be challenged and to grow.

Clergy tend to be kind, loving and caring people, but many of them have been trained to assume that Christianity is still at the center of the world. It is not, however, the 13th century, though one would never guess that from the medieval sounds that confront many worshippers each week.

I will never abandon this institution, as dismal and boring as some of its manifestations are, because I believe change can only come from within and I must be part of the church to be able to participate in its transformation. That is, however, a vocation that hardly inspires in today's generation.

It would be a step forward if churches could just sing a hymn once in a while that was written later than the 19th century.

–John Shelby Spong

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Randy, via the Internet, writes:
I am a 50-year-old man born and raised in Texas. As a child I went to a traditional Baptist church. It seemed to me at the time that the people who spoke one way on Sunday did not act that way Monday through Saturday, and I lost interest as I got older. I felt a strong spiritual connection through my young adult years that I could never quite express or understand. In 2002 my wife and I sought out a hypnotist to stop smoking. It turned out (coincidence or Divine appointment — my thinking is Divine appointment) that she was a gifted spiritual teacher. After working on some other lifestyle and family issues with her, we really liked the personal accountability for creating our own lives through our thoughts and actions we found with her. In seeking out other like-minded individuals, she introduced us to the Unity Church. We have been involved in Unity studies since and I also play guitar every Sunday in the band at Unity Dallas now. Unity is how I first heard of you and subscribed to your newsletter several years ago and really enjoy it. I have read your praise of the Unity movement several times as a progressive way to look at Christianity and spirituality. You also do not seem to subscribe to much "magical" thinking, such as the virgin birth, physically raised from the dead, etc. Some of my favorite current authors are Deepak Chopra, Gregg Braden, Neale Donald Walsh, Eckhart Tolle and Abraham-Hicks, to name a few. So my question is: How do you see the possibilities of the unseen and unknown, such as mysticism and non-physical entities? Most of the people around the Unity Movement seem to embrace an unseen world and the possibility of miracles yet believe in science, evolution, etc.

Dear Randy,

Mysticism is a powerful movement, which fascinates and attracts me. I do not, however, believe everything that goes under the general banner of mysticism. There is sometimes a fine line drawn between what some people call "spiritual experiences" and what others might call "mental illness." The claim that one can "channel for another," gain a pathway into the future or even to receive a concrete answer from the realm of the dead is to me bizarre to say the least.

I am attracted to the Unity Movement on many levels and have found wholeness of both body and mind in their congregations. Their quest for knowledge is impressive. Their joy in life aids wholeness. Their concentration on what Matthew Fox called "original blessing" rather than on original sin is a welcome relief. I think their emphasis on the enhancement of life rather than the denigration of life must be found in the Christianity of the future. I call Unity my second spiritual home. So I am delighted that you have found a place within that tradition.

Unity is just now beginning to deal with issues of biblical scholarship and it has not yet begun to look at the meaning of the sacraments. Both of those things will, I believe come with time. My sense is that Unity often reaches those who have been hurt by or wounded in traditional Christian churches, so I am grateful for the ministry they do for all of us. They offer love and healing with no strings attached. That is a terrific gift. My life has been deeply enriched by Unity and I treasure my relationship with them.

– John Shelby Spong

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Max Rippetoe from Dallas, Texas, writes:

I have a question about the timing of the writing of the epistles and gospels, most of them being done between 50-100 CE. The Temple was destroyed in 70, but this major event doesn't seem to appear in the writings. As important as this event must have been, why is it not mentioned?

Dear Max,

I do not believe you are correct in your suggestion that the fall of the Temple, which was part of the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in 70 CE, is not mentioned in the New Testament. Indeed I see it all over that text, but we need to know what we are looking for in order to see it. Let me outline what I mean.

Paul is generally thought to have done his writing between 50 at the earliest and 64 at the latest. There would obviously be no reference to the fall of Jerusalem in his writing since it had not yet occurred.

The gospels, on the other hand, fall between 70 and 100 and I do think you will find reference to the fall of Jerusalem in all of them. It is more overt in Mark, Matthew and Luke. It is present in John, but John was written 25-30 years after Jerusalem's fall so it is not quite as vivid.

In Mark, I see references to the destruction of the Temple in two places. In chapter 13, I believe the fall of the Temple is the context and provides some of the data included in that apocalyptic "end of the world" chapter.

In Mark 9, the story of the Transfiguration in which the light of God comes on Jesus, not the Temple, is a clear indication that the Temple does not exist anymore and the followers of Jesus are offering Jesus as the "Human Temple," the new meeting place between God and human life. The theme of Jesus as a substitute for the Temple grows and becomes quite obvious in John's gospel where Jesus, referring to his own body, says at his trial, "Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up." It is because I am convinced that the fall of Jerusalem in that story that I date Mark after the fall of Jerusalem or between 70-72. The apocalyptic chapters of both Matthew (28) and Luke (21) also seem to draw their images and content from the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple.

What amazes me about the New Testament record is not the absence of any content from the fall of Jerusalem in it, but rather why we have such a hard time seeing it, for it shaped dramatically the way the Christian story was understood.

John Shelby Spong